Into the Woods

Gaia’s Notebook: Edition III

Welcome to

Cosmographia

. The following is part of our Gaia’s Notebook series, where we take a look at Mother Earth in all her glory. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.

I still remember the woods behind my first home. Tall pines with thick trunks, the floor carpeted in parched needles. Little islands of light amongst the gloom. My little brother and I would dash from tree to tree, throwing pinecones at one another as we walked our dog — a beautiful Alsatian called Elsa. I remember the tinge of disappointment I always felt as we reached the forest’s edge. I wanted to pretend these were deep woods, that the trees went on forever and ever.

No matter how old one gets, the woods bring back that sense of childlike wonder. The towering trees make us feel small. The darkness seems to hide secrets. A soothing peace descends with the soft rustle of leaves underfoot, the chorus of birdsong overhead, the play of light through the canopy. The noise and demands of modern life melt away, as if a distant dream. Unencumbered, the mind wanders as freely as the feet.

Whether we like to admit it or not, the human animal is now an indoor species. 90% of our time is spent inside our houses, cars, our places of work. We spend 7 hours a day looking at screens. We have less time for nature than ever before.

All the more reason, then, to remember the woods. For a few brief moments a day, a week, a month, cast all the demands of modern life aside. Pull on your thick socks and hiking boots. Don the waterproof jacket and the bobble hat. Leave the phone at home.

And venture into the woods.

Morning in a Pine Forest — Ivan Shishkin (1886) Public Domain.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Nymphs and Satyr — William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1873) Public Domain.

Woods are not like other spaces… They make you feel small… like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs. Stand in a desert or prairie and you know you are in a big space. Stand in a woods and you only sense it. They are a vast featureless nowhere. And they are alive.

— Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998)

Undergrowth with Two Figures — Vincent van Gogh (1890) Public Domain.

The faery forest glimmered
Beneath an ivory moon,
The silver grasses shimmered
Against a faery tune.

Beneath the silken silence
The crystal branches slept,
And dreaming thro’ the dew-fall
The cold white blossoms wept.

— Sara Teasdale, ‘The Faëry Forest’ (1911)

The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti — Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) Public Domain. 

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the introduction to Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)

Ophelia — John William Waterhouse (1889) Public Domain.

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.