Angela Toomer
Spiritual Autobiography
Wranovix
6 November 2009
The Redwoods cut into the California sky high above me. I am in a different kind Earth than the Arkansas hills and pine trees I’m used to seeing, as I feel my eyes, my face, and my neck being irresistibly drawn upward. My back starts to ache a little because of this extension, or maybe because intense beauty always makes me ache a little. I breathe the air. It feels old, the same way air inside of an old building feels dusty, like it doesn’t belong to you, but to inhabitants who died already, a million lives sleeping and sighing with nostalgia beneath me in the ground. I feel the dust of thousands of years in my body, like my pores are absorbing this dirt, the old bark dust being worn away by sweeping wind as the trees slice it along the way. I feel young.
I guess I am young. I’m fifteen and wrapped up in my world, but for this hour of running through the trees, I’m given a rest from that. We smile for the camera, tourists with the goal of proving: We were here. We are, in a flash of a picture, made infinite. We continue tumbling over the trees, and we’re suddenly five-years-old again, as the trees make us forget our teenage worries, the heartbreaking pain specific to being fifteen-years-old. I feel like I’m absorbing energy from the floor beneath me. I consider the soles of the shoes that walked before me, the others who have said, “We were here.” I want to crawl into a corner of the forest and people watch for a few hours, see the lives as they pass before me, those making a pilgrimage to this sacred forest.
Despite its age, the forest hasn’t stopped moving, it isn’t dead. The scattered fallen trees are a testament to how much the forest moves. The noise the trees must make as they crash to the ground, the disturbance it doubtless creates, is hard to picture right now, though. My sisters and I climb across the trees, and we’re invincible, leaping and running like we can’t fall. The forest has not settled down, though its trunks and roots lie heavy in the soil. There is, regardless of its energy, a holy stillness pervading the air, as though the forest is an old, European cathedral, the trunks as framework for the building. It’s the kind of place you whisper in, where parents shush their children fidgeting in the pews. The light filters through the trunks, different colors, like stained glass. Instead of telling the Stations of the Cross or the lives of the saints, these are windows showing secrets of the woods. These windows are more subtle, the lines more blurry, and hold stories that are more subjective to the viewer than Biblical parables. The trees whisper to each other their stories, telling anecdotes they’ve recounted a million times. The trees hold secrets, and I will not be able to find them out in this hour-or-so long visit with my family. They hold secrets about God in the rings of their trunks. I will not be able to learn them in a hundred years of living here, and sleeping on the floor, no matter how much I question the forest, trying to coax out its meaning. The raccoons and hummingbirds know its meaning, I’m fairly certain, but they aren’t telling me.
I imagine how this place must look when the sun sets. I picture the thick shadows stretching on for eternity across the forest floor, creating parallel lines, and the yellow light that streams through the forest as the sun makes its way across the red sky towards the horizon. At night, when the trees have stopped telling their stories for a bit, because everything needs rest, the forest yawns, tells the world goodnight, see you in the morning, and slumbers. The trees kiss each other goodnight, their branches reaching out to each other, and their roots settle down. It sleeps in pine needle beds, beneath a canopy of branches spread out across the sky, only moving to turn over in sleep occasionally.