“The Terrible Beauty Of Nature”

“My sharp intake of breath when I saw that large beautiful branch of the apple tree lying on the ground. That lovely tree such a part of the farm, your art and the lives of the animals. I can’t imagine what you felt when you saw it. Then there was the rainbow- a full bow with the most beautiful rays extending down from it. WOW! Never saw anything like it. Then I was able to say “yes life on the farm goes on”- life and death, growth and decay. The terrible beauty of nature existing by its own rules which we are privileged to be a part of but not control.” Lois

What I have lived the changes that happen, walking in the same small woods year after year.   How the woods breathe in and out, through the life and death that occurs there.  A single organism made up of countless living parts.  Some too small for me to see, others towering over me.

When we first moved to the farm I made a footpath through the woods that goes from the gate in  the back pasture over the stone wall, and ends at the little waterfall.

I did it by cutting back some of the honeysuckles and walking the same route over and over again.

I was proud of my little path, glad the hard work of creating it was done.  Until the first tree fell across it.  It was an apple tree, the bare trunk twisted and bent in a way so it didn’t lay flat on the ground but was inconveniently  high to step over.

I tried to move it off the path, but tree was too big and entwined with all that grew on either side of my foot path.

So I left it thinking maybe one day I’d come back with a saw and cut it up. But I never did and soon other trees fell across my path and I learned to step over them.

Then a very tall maple fell, the top most branches landing right in my path.  The leaves made a wall of green twice my height, the branches a tangle too thick to walk through.

So I walked around the tree top on the ground. The dogs did too and the deer and whoever else used the path when I wasn’t in the woods.

For that first summer the leaves continued to grow or at least they stayed green. Until  the fall when they withered and hung like sleeping brown bats from the branches.

Over the past few years I watched as the branches thinned and broke.  Soon they were a pile on the ground.

Now the only branches left are ones I can wrap my two hands around.  They  are sunk half way into the earth, creating a haphazard corduroy road, that me, the dogs and the other animals in woods can walk on.

So now there is a fork in my little foot path.  The path around the fallen maple and the original path paved with branches.

It took me a while, but lately I find myself taking the original path.  I wonder if the the other animals are too.  And if soon the woods will take back the alternate path so I will eventually forget it was even there.

I tend to think  that when something changes it is gone forever.

But the woods and my own life  are teaching me that many things come back, whether I want them to or not. They many not be exactly the same and are often changed for better or worse.

But that, as Lois so eloquently wrote, is “The terrible beauty of nature, existing by its own rules, which we are privileged to be a part of but not control.