I recently rediscovered the magic steps in the woods behind my mother’s house. I had spent a couple days with her as she was recovering from a surgery, and during one of her naps I retired to the woods of my childhood.
For those of you who read my blog more regularly, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods as of late, but this time was different.
Returning to the place you grew up is always a bit of a Pandora’s box- even when you actively choose to keep that darn box closed. And for me, it was no different.
I had not actually slept at my mother’s house since my early twenties, and the thing I learned about a recovery from a major surgery is there is actually a lot of sleeping involved. This left me with an unexpected amount of unstructured quiet time to myself. Time to reflect. Time for reverie. Time to remember.
Because I lived in this house for 18 years until I left for college, there were a whole lot of memories that bubbled up to the surface as I sat there at her kitchen table, listening to the light snores coming from her bedroom. And as I sat, I looked out the long row of windows that line her kitchen toward the woods that surround the property. This view from the kitchen table pulled me back in time to when these woods were magical for me.
I grew up in an age when the land that surrounded your home was just as much your “home” as was your bedroom, living room and kitchen.
Growing up, the front door and back door to our house were forever opening and closing as my sister and I wandered in and out to play or my parents walked in or out to attend to the gardens, chickens and geese, or yard work.
The woods was my favorite part though- in all4 New England seasons.
In the spring, I loved the woods for playing a game my sister and I called “highway.” In this game she and I would go out in the rain when the woods, which bordered a swampy wetland , was particularly muddy. In the game, we would try to balance on all of the fallen trees and walk across them. The fallen trees were the “highways” and if you fell, you were out.
In truth though, being “out” meant nothing. If you fell off the log, you would just climb back on and continue to tightrope walk across to another fallen tree. This little detail is actually what made it one of those perfect childhood games- a game with no beginning and no end, no winners and no losers. Similar to games like tag and hide and seek.
These times spent in the woods felt magical to me. One minute I was having a boring Saturday afternoon and the next I was transported to a fantasy world just down the steps from my house.
I suppose this is why it should come as no surprise that a rock formation lodged in the hill behind our house soon got dubbed the magic steps, and in every season, a hike in the woods behind our house soon required that we first climb the magic steps to christen our journey.
This ritual began in early fantasy games of our childhood and continued into the later camping out nights of our youth. Climbing the magic steps became its own rite of passage to our larger imagination.
So decades later, when I found myself again in the forest that held so many memories for me, without much thinking, I began to walk in the direction of that familiar rock formation.
This experience made me contemplate how the forest holds such a magical quality for many of us during childhood. With all the myths that we watch on the big screen or read about in books that include fairies coming alive and encounters with strange and wonderful animal creatures, perhaps this “magic” we experience is a prelude to what we might later in adulthood call mystery or spirit.
I recently listened to an interview with the 20th century theologian Howard Thurman. He began by talking about the oak tree in the backyard of his childhood home in Daytona Beach, Florida.
In the interview, he described the tree in such loving terms with that same sentimental tone that I share regarding the landscape just outside of the doors of his actual house.
In a newspaper article I found from the Orlando Sentinel from 1987, it was noted that followers of Dr. Thurman who made the pilgrimage to his childhood home, which was later transformed into a cultural center, would often sit under this very same tree to honor the work of this great man. The article noted, some of the pilgrims would cry.
It makes me wonder, maybe in childhood we need these more concrete objects and places like trees and forests so that we can slip into that state of imagination that opens us up to what is far beyond what we can actually see or hear or touch; a state of imagination that would allow, for example, a young African American boy like Dr. Thurman, born in a Jim Crow south, to envision something as distant as an inter-racial church congregation.
As an adult and parent now, I am watching my children encounter magic. With my 6 year-olds’ well-orchestrated fantasy games and my 2 year-olds’ look of wonder at things as concrete and small as acorns and pine cones, I try to hold this idea that magic may just be the early incarnation of mystery and spirit.
One of my daughter’s favorite books right now is Pocahontas. This particular picture book we own is one of those cheesy Disney spin-offs of the 1995 animated movie, but in it there is a picture of the willow tree that Pocahontas talks to for comfort and guidance.
If you don’t remember, or you have never seen it, this particular willow tree has the face of a grandmother- with wrinkles and all.
My daughter loves this particular page in the book, often going back to it and exclaiming “Ga-ma! Ga-ma!”
For me, the talking willow tree brings forth the nostalgia of those magic steps in the woods of my childhood which I now view as an early willingness to encounter and embrace a mystery and spirit that may be far beyond my own imagination- as it should be.
How did you encounter magic in your childhood? How do you embrace mystery now?
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