During the early months of the pandemic, the only time I feel not insane is when Steve and I walk in the forest. In the human world, I am living deep inside what I call the P2C2 terror vortex: Pandemic! Politics! Climate Change! It feels like the entire world is screaming.
But when I am in the forest, what I think is, the trees aren’t panicking.
When faced with a potential threat, our minds tend to either “round down” the probability to “basically zero” and we underreact, “or we focus on the worst-case outcome (which) gives us a strong feeling, so we overreact.”
Dr. Slovic made these statements to the New York Times on March 3, 2020, just as the pandemic was starting. He was explaining why the population was splitting so clearly between those who were terrified and those who were furious at every one who was terrified. In the years that followed, his analysis became ever more prescient, as the “basically zero” and the “worst case scenario” camps went to war not with the virus, but with each other, fighting over the divide between those who wouldn’t leave their houses and those who lost their tempers when asked to wear a mask.
It is a war out there.
But when I am in the woods, I crunch through leaves layered crispy and soft, dirt one day soft as my sneakers and then crusty as burnt toast. I look out through thin broken branches at mountaintops thirty miles away or a thick field of vibrating green might cover my entire field of vision, and something inside me whispers seasons.
With an emerging threat on the horizon in the form of an invisible virus slithering across the United States, with a high-stakes election, political unrest, and a racial reckoning, the year 2020 became a petri dish of threat assessments. In a chemical reaction, the most volatile moment is that delta when the reaction is taking place, the moment of change. That’s where most of the world was living in 2020 and where we are living still. We are at a delta moment. We are at our most vulnerable, our most chaotic.
It is terrifying. It is unstable.
But also: I can look at the clouds sliding across the sky; I could stand on the mountain and see that to the west was storm clouds and to the right was blue sky, and I can remember, just for a moment: weather.
I peer at the fractals of branches standing in the same exact spot for years and years, but always growing all the same, and I watch the leaves, each one its own complete world, its own fully expressed life, and it feels like there is a whisper somewhere just beneath the wind, somewhere I almost can but not quite hear.
Is there something deeper?
Inside me I feel depleted. I have been working so hard, but there is an empty spot. In 2020 and in 2021, I am resigned to the fact that there are certain things I will never feel again. Like deep joy, or sustainable peace, or safety. I think I will never feel that particular kind of lightness that I did when I was playing soccer as a kid, or writing Laura Ingalls Wilder fanfiction, or even when I was young in New York City, taking a bus downtown on a Saturday morning with a big fat book to keep me company. I miss the lightness, the ease that comes from a spirit that has not been wounded yet, has not suffered yet.
Is there something truer?
Trees know things, and scientists are just now beginning to understand what trees know. How there is no such thing as a single tree, for instance, that every tree is connected to the forest, the world’s first internet, a network that we are at the barest edge of understanding. Trees communicate with each other, we think we are the only storytellers, but that is because we barely understand what a story even is.
In the forest, I walk and my feet pass over a root, and that root has been in that spot since before I was born, before my grandmother was born, that root has never seen anything in the world but this patch of earth, but that root knows something I don’t know, that root is connected to this forest in a way I will never be.
Something else is talking to me, during those months. Something else is moving around me, in a way I can almost feel.
I mean, it’s not necessarily a coincidence that the spoiled prince Siddhartha sat under a tree and then emerged as Buddha, having found enlightenment.
Is there something else?
Pro tip: All you ever have to do, if you want your story to change, is get curious. If you’re stuck in despair, or anger, or fear, and you can’t see how to get to hope, or love, or peace, just get curious.
I should reiterate here, as we start off into a different kind of wilderness, that this part of the story is not about answers. This part of the story is about questions.
And this is the question I ask, standing in the forest, in 2020 and 2021, the world boiling around me, and I am just trying to listen, I am just trying to understand.
If only there was a narrator, I think to myself; someone who can tell me the story of the world that is beyond my understanding.
If only there was a translator, I think to myself; someone who can help me understand a language I do not speak.
I did the one thing that you always have to do, if you’re stuck and you want to move the story forward. I got curious.
Curiosity is a bridge emotion. It takes us from where we are stuck to where we want to go. In scripture, it is always the questions that drive the story forward. It’s the same thing in life. It’s the questions that matter most. You don’t have to know the answers, to start the journey. We almost never do. You just have to ask the questions.
Certainty stops a story. Curiosity starts one. So if you’re stuck, stop being sure. Instead, be curious.
In 2020, my story was stuck, struggling, spinning in place, so I asked a question, and I kept asking, every way I knew how.
If nature is the only perfect narrator, the only voice that makes sense in a world gone insane,
how can I hear her better?
I asked the question, again and again, and again. And one day, in July of 2021, in a shack in the woods, after months of preparation, the world showed me the next step forward.
.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter (almost) every week.
Nothing is unclear in the Bible. Of course you have to believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior in order to believe it is His infallible Word.
I truly believe we live in the end times and nothing is that surprising to me because the Bible spells it out clearly. I pray every one reading this feels His peace.
Thank you again for lending yourself to the question. P.S. the answer is not 42