A Walk in the Woods

So many of my favorite stories have at least one scene or chapter that takes place in the woods.

Harry Potter for instance, where Harry finds himself in the Forbidden Forrest for an evening of detention.

Merry and Pippin (The Lord of the Rings), introduce the sagacious Treebeard upon entering the Forest of Fangorn.

And of course, there's the enchanted snowy wood where Lucy finds herself after hiding in the wardrobe. (The Chronicles of Narnia).

I myself love walks in the woods. The fresh air is good for the mind and the soul, and as such, poems about the trees, flowers, or creek beds usually follow.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but nature more.

-Lord Byron

A Breath of the Woods

Once in life's Moon of Blossoms,

I was a woodland child,

Shy as a fawn of a forest,

Wild as the winds are wild;

Seeking the haunts of the thrushes,

Answering back their song,

Learning the call of the bluebird

Wafted the glades along;

Listening the cataract's cadence,

Chanted in monotone,

Lilting the tune of the brooklet

Tinkling from stone to stone.

Learning the language of flowers,

Making their secrets mine-

Violet, daffodil, daisy,

Orchid and eglantine.

-Lilian Leveridge

''Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I... but when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.''

-Christina Rosetti

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Barry

''If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.''

-Rainer Maria Rilke

''The poetry of the earth is never dead.''

-John Keats

''The wanderers of life

are made of earth and sky.

They see the universe

with stars in their eyes.''

-Christy Ann Martine

''Come away, O human child:

To the waters and the wild

with a fairy, hand in hand,

For the world's more full

of weeping than you can understand.''

-William Butler Yeats

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

''I was walking deep in the woods, and I saw how the sunlight reached down between the trees to touch the tiny plants. We are loved more than we will ever know.''

-J. Lynn

The next time you go for a walk in the woods, take a journal. You never know what words the wind may whisper to you among the trees and along the creeks.