Into the Woods

After the historic Forest Preservation meeting of October 27, I went out to the woods.   I went up to the high ridge where I could see the most of her.   Has your heart ever felt so much you thought it might explode?   Deep into the woods I got off the path and slowly made my way through the quarter moonlight.   There is something I want to tell her so badly.   At my arrival to the ridge's edge, I stood purposefully inside the swaying trees.   I thanked the Great Spirit that our efforts came amidst a people who could hear the call of the wild.  Then I gave it my all to open up to the presence of the forest.   The creatures bedded down; the land fanning out from underfoot into the mighty Patuxent.   I sensed the baby rabbits that had been born this spring huddling in the fresh coming cold.   I sensed the young eagle just learning to fly.   I sensed The Red-tailed Hawk nearby.  I felt the darting minnow in the creek and the streaking red fox and there above is the lumbering owl.  I felt the shaking oak nodding to me.  And there is something I want to tell her, the woods, the Great North Woods, so badly.

I jumped up on a log and panned a view across the valley and then said with grateful reverence, "Hello, Great Woods!   I just came from the place where they make decisions about what to do with you.   It is with utter jubilee that I say we did this thing that in essence consummates in a larger way the love between a people and their land.   The Great Chiefs of Council have said that for many, many moons to come we will be able to roam as wee little children in your great, great wooded hills and that for even a longer time to come your wind will lift our hair in every season and freshen the brow only as sweet as your woods can do."  I stretched my arms out into the moonlight and sang out, "Sleep tight tonight my brothers and sisters -- we have taken you into our hearts; into the family of Greenbelt."

After visiting for a time with the Forest Presence I began to walk back home.   It was then that it came to me -- the fullness of the relationship.   That, in all these decades of finding comfort and solace in her, she could now find it in us.

Paul Downs, President, Committee to Save the Green Belt
from a letter to the editor of the Greenbelt News Review, Dec. 18, 2003