Acrylic on canvas

24” x 30”

2018

The woods feel so much like home to me that it is always hard to leave; its always hard to peel my eyes away and force my feet to walk the other direction. The woods are everything: bright light and unmistakable dark, mystifying intricacies and easy simplicity, melodic songs and deafening silence, new life alongside natural death, comprehendible lessons and elusive truth. 

Time spent in the woods never feels like enough. I think this has less to do with me needing to work on being content and more to do with the phenomenon of my mere humanness coming up against divine gloriousness. I am hungry for the invigorating fullness and the sense of grounding I find among the many trees that I can never fully grasp. The full beauty and goodness and grandeur and rightness is incomprehensible. Sometimes I let this bother me a little bit. I find myself fearing that I haven’t quite soaked up enough beauty or that I just can’t quite take in this much goodness or beauty or wonder. 

But then I remember the irony: I am a wonderfully imperfect human being trying to capture the full breadth of a divine creation. An elusive and glorious mystery. I’m not supposed to be able to grasp it or wrap my head, heart, or eyes around it. That’s the gift of being human. The enrapturing mystery, the cloudy gray, the clearly unclear…we do not fully grasp the extent of these gifts. If we possessed the capabilities to fully understand, then we wouldn’t sit under the trees like hopeful children, eager to learn what we don’t yet know. If we could fully grasp all that the woods are and have and do, we wouldn’t have the pleasure of becoming blissful explorers searching for brand new discoveries every time we set foot behind a tree line. If we were able to fully wrap our hearts around the endless gifts waiting for us in the woods, then we would stop opening the presents, because we would already know what was inside. Thank God we’re human. Thank God for the woods.