“Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives –”

–Mary Oliver

This year the winter in Wisconsin has been hard on the trees.  The branches of the white pine were so laden with snow they snapped off leaving raw wood exposed high above and a yard full of sticks below and limbs now frozen under more layers of snow.  The spring will reveal a tangled mass of branches.  The birch trees are bent and may stay that way.  We climb through the snow and move aside newly fallen branches and reclaim the path.  Yet strangely grateful for this task, this tussle with the branches and the snapping sound they make. It is a reminder that we have entered another place, the woods and all it offers.

Depending on our mood we enter other lives like we enter the woods.  We walk until there is an obstacle.  I have often tossed a branch off into the woods only to have it hit a tree and come right back to me.  Or carefully lifting and moving fallen branches or walking deep into the woods with a long branch dragging the leafy top behind me.  Neatly Cutting, clipping, and sawing fallen limbs stacking them along the path for a creature or person to use.  The black and white of the winter is framed by a tangle of branches, often glistening with ice or snow.  On a hike a big glob of snow will fall on me as if thrown by a kid on the playground. It always makes me laugh, wet faced, and momentarily incensed.  We step off the path and tangle with the woods and are glad for the branch that springs back and reminds us that we took a chance.

“Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left —
fields everywhere invite you into them.”

–Mary Oliver