You cannot live in such a wild wooded place as this without learning its language or hearing its melody playing itself over endlessly even in your dreams. Imperceptibly, you come to know the hour of the day by the sunlight’s slant through the trees and the severity of an approaching storm by how deeply the treetops bow before it. Unless all your senses have dulled, you cannot fail to be moved by nature’s indomitable spirit and by how each player in her eternal drama humbly accepts its role and faithfully executes it.

In such a place, your sense of being and perception are altered, and the more time you spend alone here, with only the wind’s whisper to fill your nights, the more you come to understand the reasons that make it all basic to the human experience.

We all need a place to go to from time to time where the human touch is not as evident, a place away from those manufactured things labeled “Necessities” that make up the world in which many, if not most, of us live, and where the pure and simple wonders are often lost in the chaos. In the woods, nature is the designer, assembling textures and colors in such a way that the end result is never anything less than perfect. Some spend their lives trying to capture this perfection on canvas or film, when both media lack the vital dimension of being able to interact with the subject, as when you run your hand along a beech tree’s silky bark or bite into a wintergreen leaf plucked from the ground. 

Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, life is a production from whose stage our performances are reviewed daily based on our beliefs, choices and actions or reactions. In a society where the value system is off-kilter, what doesn’t qualify as important should, and what does becomes all-consuming, a process that is often laughingly attributed to human nature. But remove “human” from the equation, and a very different dynamic emerges. For in the woods among the green things and creatures that creep or fly and whose primary objective is simply to survive, there is no such rating system, and no one is ever on trial. Here, all living things go about their business without thought beyond that.

The freedom to step down from life’s stage occasionally is not only a joy but a necessity, one that I’ve enjoyed for some time now. For in nature, there is no performance rating and no applause meter, but simply a quiet and peaceful coexistence in a place that makes no demands or passes any judgments. The stones in the rock wall that separates this land from the next don’t care what I wear when I’m cutting and lugging wood or clearing leaves from the culvert to help the spring flow freely. Nor do the chipmunks mind that I’ve got those muddy boots on again, and that my clothes are white with sawdust. There’s a decidedly delicious sense of freedom in being able to walk out your front door not caring how you look and not worrying about who will see that your hair’s a mess and you have no makeup on.

For me, knowing the wood box is full outweighs most other pleasures, and the sight of smoke curling from the chimney trumps any I may have overlooked. And for some reason, the excitement I feel on the ride home from wherever else I’ve been increases exponentially as I approach the turnoff that will lead me once again into these woods. As close to the main drag as I am, this place is like another dimension into which I willfully vanish each day, a world within a world where life at its most basic perseveres, the place that, for now at least, I call home.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.