Quiet-Not-Quiet
There’s a last day for everything, and you usually won’t know it until it’s over.
I stood in bare feet, mud and leaves clinging to me up to my ankles. Dangerous, maybe, when you think about where I was. In the woods, in a clearing, surrounded by fallen trees and tangles of undergrowth. A year from this moment I would step on a snake, while walking barefoot in the cow pasture a few hundred feet from this spot. That snake would curl around my foot and propel me, running, back to my house, and into a pair of smelly, dirty sneakers that I’d wear on these excursions from that point on.
But not yet.
Today I was barefoot in the woods. The rain-saturated ground squished between my toes as a I walked. The clearing had a new feature—a pond had formed, up to my shins. I’d already waded into it and through it to get to the other side.
A fallen tree sat by the shore of the new pond. I’d climbed on this a hundred times, and now I did it again, and sat on it, like a pier, dangling my bare feet in the shallow water.
The rain had stopped a couple of days ago, but the ground was still muddy and soaked. Everything else—the fallen tree, the living trees, the leaves above—was all dry. The leaves were so dry, in fact, that they became raspy in the wind.
The wind moved, invisible but definitely present.
The rasp of leaves picked up. The rustle. The white noise. An ocean sound, in the middle of the woods.
I sat on that log and was suddenly enclosed.
It’s like a room, I thought. It’s like I’m in a room outside.
The sound engulfed me. The breeze didn’t touch me there, under those trees. It was blocked from getting to me, but it must have wanted me, because it kept moving everything above me. It kept making that sound that engulfed me.
It went on like this for several minutes, and I found myself experiencing peace like I’d never known, and in many ways have never felt since. I felt like God was embracing me.
I was young. Just a kid. Maybe seven, maybe eight years old. What did I know of God or that kind of embrace? Or even of peace, for that matter? I’d only been around for a very short time. I wasn’t yet seeking peace, the way I do now. I didn’t even know the difference, in having it or not having it.
But there are moments in our lives when that kind of noisy quiet flows in, like ocean waves at high tide. We’re engulfed in it. We didn’t know it was missing until it was there.
Eventually I left the clearing. I always had to, at some point. But there are also always those days, always inevitably that day, when you leave these places for the last time. You don’t even know it, when it’s happening.
There is that last day you went outside to play with your friends. There’s that last day you would wake up in the world of absolute freedom that comes with being an adolescent. The last day you went barefoot in the tall weeds. There is the last day you sat on a log with your feet in a pond in the middle of the woods.
And you never even knew it.
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A NOTE AT THE END
I miss where I grew up. I love where we live now, but sometimes I think back on those days running around barefoot in Wild Peach, Texas, and they have the glow of heaven. That hazy, special air surrounds them, a rippling radiance of nostalgia and beckoning.
I was a happy kid. And solitary... I’m starting to see that. Despite friends and cousins and a little brother always around, I tended to wander off on my own.
I still do.
There’s something about being solitary in the woods that awakens something inside you.
I think back on that “outside room” feeling a lot. That quiet-not-quiet energy is something that touched my soul. You don’t forget that, even if you were a kid at the time.
These days I go for walks in the woods. I’m blessed to have a nature trail just a few feet from my home. And there are trails within a short drive of here that are stunning and peaceful and inviting.
I recommend walks in the woods. I recommend solitude.
I think I may have to slip out...
Once again, a wonderful piece. I grew up in small town in Nebraska. It has since been swallowed in Omaha's outward expansion. I stay in touch with some of the people I grew up with, but many have moved away, quite a few have died. I'm going to be seventy-four in August. Your prose brings back many nostalgic memories. Thank You Ed Hamell
I'm just back from my solitary hike in the woods at my local state park, Lake of Three Fires, near Bedford, Iowa. So nice and peaceful, great exercise, and lots of God's beauty if your eyes and heart are open to see. At the end, God presented me with a resting female Tiger Swallowtail butterfly so I could get a picture. I share my hike photos on Facebook for my friends to enjoy that are unable to make the hike themselves.