Winter’s chill permeates the woods as I wander along the pathway and I pull my jacket a little closer. The Christmas season with all its festivities has passed and the woods and their inhabitants are sleeping. Most of us have been wishing each other “season’s greetings” in the not-too-distant past with no thought to what greetings this season of the year is giving to those of us who come to share the “tonic of wildness” like Henry David Thoreau wrote.
On a recent holiday trip to a friend’s farm, I had the opportunity to walk the winter woods noticing little gifts Mother Nature left behind for the wanderer to notice. Somehow, that reminded me about the writings of Henry David Thoreau. It’s been a while since I considered his philosophy, but I read a lot of Thoreau during my college days at Sam Houston State University. My walk in the woods made me remember the following quote from Thoreau:
“We need the tonic of wildness ... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
As I walked on the wooded path, I realized that the winter solstice had passed for this year, that the days were getting longer and the nights shorter. Since prehistory, the winter solstice has been an important time of year for mankind. Hope for the new life in the coming Spring – the subtle awakening of the plants and animals of the forest. The gifts of nature bringing anyone who cares to discover, greetings of the season to us mortals – not in the form of language or Christmas cards, but in the beauty spread out before us. The purples, yellows, oranges, browns and greens of the sweet gum leaf floating to the forest floor. The red berries decorating a 16-foot holly tree, bringing beauty and sustenance to forest dwellers. The reverent crunch of the leaves carpeting the forest floor.
Thoreau expresses my thoughts about the greetings from this winter season in his Journal February 19, 1852: “The sky appears broader now than it did. The day has opened its eyelids wider. The lengthening of the days, commenced a good while ago, is a kind of forerunner of spring.”
Like Thoreau, I find the greetings of this season a moment of quiet renewal emerging from the year’s darkest moment to the returning light of spring. I find delight in nature’s stark beauty, promising new life.
“Ah dear nature – the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.” – Journal, 12 December 1851.
