The Frost poem sat comfortably in the front of my mind this morning as I wandered out into the redwoods at the back of my parents’ property, thinking of the imminent death of my grandfather. The young woods back there are fairy-tale-storybook beautiful, and in the morning sunlight, bejeweled with the billions of droplets generated by the last week’s drizzle, they are a magical kingdom.

I was blessed with an almost unfairly happy childhood here in Humboldt County, California. I was sustained by jolts of remarkable bliss, even ecstasy, so that even as a child I noticed and wondered at the profundity of my joy. I formed a theory that somehow the happy-chemicals in my brain were responding to some sort of unusual always-on stimulus, and figured I was biologically lucky to have such an excess of well-being. And of course I lived in a loving home in a beautiful part of the world, with enough money and enough time, and was successful in school and made good friends, and I’m sure all these things conspired to make me as bizarrely happy as I was.

As an adult on my own in the urban landscape of Seattle, with ups and downs that seem more within the range of normal human experience, with heartbreak and stress and angst and worry and loneliness and depression along with the fun and the joy and the love, I occasionally hark back to my pre-adolescent days of peace and enthusiasm and wonder what changed. On darker days, I think that all the gunk of life, all the baggage of failure and self-doubt and broken hearts that are the normal obstacles in a wearying adult life have so silted over and corroded my natural capacity for joy that it is irretrievable. That never again will I be capable of experiencing the simple, almost spiritual happiness of my childhood. That being grown-up means being necessarily complex and corrupted.

Except—I just took a 10-minute walk in the woods of my childhood. And the very first moment I stepped outside into the dewy, shining morning, peering into the sunlit mist of the shady redwood forest carpeted with ferns, the old joy bubbled up again instantly. And gradually, like a developing photograph, all the human-made follies of thought: that life can be bad or broken or free of wonder; that anybody is evil; that there are irrevocable mistakes that make life worse forever; that I am unworthy of success; that success is even important; all these follies faded and became transparent and were revealed as the filmy, substance-less constructs that they are. And like soap bubbles, they popped. And I was alone in the quiet woods of my childhood, realizing: it was not that I was innocent or un-jaded or free from the cares of the world that made me so happy here. It was that I had the great good fortune to occupy this magical place, these powerful woods of peace, and allowed them to have their effect on me.

I love Seattle, and I love the urban lifestyle, and I suspect I will be a city-dweller for most of the rest of my life. But it is good to remember that I was born a creature of the forest, and if I don’t return occasionally for a solitary moment in the trees, I will waste away into a terrible existence full of irrelevant cares. It is so easy, living in the city, to forget how little all those stressful things matter. For just a moment, taking in a redwood tree, it is obvious that we will live and die and the earth will go on, and my most massive strivings will melt back into the earth and out of memory, and that I lived at all will matter much more than all the things that filled my life. I cannot help but be part of the cycle. My most important work is being done already, without my lifting a finger. I’m okay. And the earth is turning along majestically. Damn, but we are lucky beings.

With gratitude and joy,
Alissa