It began many years ago. I was in my early teens when I began to become intimate with the velvet woods. I never realized what was actually happening at the time. All I knew was that I felt a heart tug and I was attracted to the woods.
Something inside me reached out to experience that deep feeling of intimacy that the woods offered. In my teens, I began to describe the woods as a “velvet forest,” my way of acknowledging the deeply sensuous experience of entering and passing through the palpable embrace of the woods.
This past weekend I was walking up the path from the lake to my cabin in the woods when I unmistakably felt that deep reaching out to one another, the woods and I. The invitation was so clear. The difference between us faded and I once again touched that deeply familiar and intimate plane that I share with the woods.
In a flash, I understood how I had, over many years of practice in the woods, learned to take the seen and bring it into the unseen. What would appear in a sensory realm was a lingering and longing invitation to a place beyond sensory experience and delight. I was no longer just in a plane of trees and branches, needles and leaves. Neither was I in a wholly abstract place unaware of surrounding sights and touch.
Perhaps I was finding myself in between where my senses reached out and so did all the power and energy inside me. The seen and the unseen had a place to meet.
Stanley Kunitz spoke of gardening as an erotic experience. The garden is an invitation to the erotic, the deepening of our nature, an encounter with the deep energy which we share with all things. I think that equally describes what it is like walking in the woods. It describes what it means to be able to experience the velvet.
The erotic nature of the woods is there to be experienced, to be felt by our own erotic nature. However, that eroticism exists beyond the senses, beyond the seen. Not everyone can feel it. The woods is a waiting, welcoming lover, ready to receive anyone on a deep level. But perhaps not everyone.
Like any engagement with the erotic, the woods requires an open self if it is to share what it has to offer. It requires a willing surrender to the invitation of intimacy. The practiced blending of the seen and the unseen is a part of a walk along a path in the woods as it is in any experience of deep intimacy.
I have learned over many years, and oh so slowly, what an intimate place the woods can be. Fortunately, I began to get a taste of the velvet nature of the woods while I was still in my teens. The woods surrounding my cabin are where I intend my ashes to be placed when I can no longer walk into the embrace of my velvet forest. It is where I belong, where I feel most closely what it is like to be home.