If You Go Down to the Woods Today

If you go down to the woods, do not go on this particular day. Not when the stars are in just this pattern, not in this specific beat between two seasons, not when the wind stands just so and the clouds are drawing this picture. If you go down to the woods on this day, you’re sure of a big surprise. The sort of surprise that’s inimical the life you used to be so settled and secure in. If you go down to the woods today, you can never go home again.

On a date that you don’t know, according to a cycle that’s not set by humans for humans to work around, the woods are different. The collective noun for owls is Parliament, but this is the day when the entire house is in session: not just the owls, or just the birds or even just the animals. The earth itself sits together and listens to the arguments go back and forth and decisions are taken.

There is a clearing in the woods. It isn’t very big, but it’s somehow large enough for mountains to sit down with mice, for fire and rain to blackball each other, for the air and ice to strike deals that are expressed across the wide acres of the sky.

If you look for sense in the senseless fury of storms and earthquakes you’ll find it here, as the forces that shake the world hold parliament, make and break treaties and have their conflicts judged. This is not somewhere humanity has a say, or even a seat. We have no place at this table, nor the strength to make our tiny voices heard, even if we spoke the language.

If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise. And the surprise is this: that before the Parliament of Owls and Rats and Predators and Prey and Air and Water and Mountains and Caverns, you utterly, utterly unimportant. If humanity acted together for the first time since there were more than a hundred of us, we might just sway a single motion by one single vote.

It is a truth that defeats. It’s a truth that makes people pull the covers over their heads and turn over. That’s why you feel it in your bones that there are days when the rain stings and the wind blows through you and the world is simply not for you.

But, if you do go down to the woods on that day, when the parliament of the earth is in session, what you will find is that the bears are caterers par excellence.