Nothing Much Happens. Everything Happens.

After just a few steps away from our front door, the woods welcome me into their world and our house disappears behind pines and oaks and elms and maples. Soon, I am in the other world, the one that came before all of us, the one that will still be here when we are gone. The one we forget about all too easily and often.

A leaf spins on the remains of an invisible spider web, caught in a breeze I did not feel but is there nonetheless. A blue jay squawks at me from a nearby white oak, warning me that I am going into already claimed territory. A funnel web spider sits perched at the doorstep to its trap, its outline a menace to any prey that happens to notice it before it’s too late.

At a split in the trail, the shredded bark of a juniper tells me that the squirrels will be warm in their nests high above us in the canopy. I am obliged to run my hand gently over the bark, imagine a bed warmed by my body heat trapped in a nest full of woody shreds.

Half-eaten hickory nuts blanket the ground as I descend a former logging road long grown over but its scar still visible. Incisor marks surround the missing portions of the nuts, a testament to the strength of small things to overcome the hardest of circumstances over and over again.

I kneel and crawl at the bottom of the hill. My knees are covered in the stuff of the woods floor: half-composted leaves, pine needles, and black soil. I cannot resist overturning leaves and rocks, pushing my face closer to the earth to see what I could not see while standing.

Here in the shadows I see the mosses and the mushrooms, the liverworts and the fallen lichen. They live quiet lives here.

I sit still and wait with them.

Nothing much happens. Everything happens.

It is impossible to know what I am seeing sometimes even when I am focused and intent on knowing.

A red-tailed hawk flies overhead and a squirrel in the canopy leaps to a new tree and freezes. Leaves drop to the ground where I am sitting. The hawk keeps to the sky, its gaze elsewhere now.

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