Into the Timeless Woods I Go

By: Erik Rittenberry

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.

--John Fowles

Woke up this morning with an 
agonizing urge 
to be an absolute nobody
in a world gone mad
with everybody trying
to be a “somebody.”

To be unknown and unseen
like a distant star in an
undiscovered galaxy, a dandelion 
loafing beneath the sun 
in some deserted pasture, 
to be an anonymous 
breeze that rustles the 
ferns of an ancient 
forest at the edge 
of the world. 

Ah, yes...

To be far away, adrift and alone, 
sauntering in a leafy alcove, 
"where Nature moves, and 
Rapture warms the Mind."

To get out there beyond the 
perimeter 
of this barbed wire civilization,
far removed from worldly
titles and deadlines and the 
delusional drudgery and 
pandemonium of endless 
ambition. 

To be barbarically alive, to savor 
the pure lifeblood of our primitive
marrow, to cleanse myself
of the filth of steel-and-asphalt
reality, to resuscitate the inner 
archaic spirit, to unite the conscious
with the shadow and allow
grace to devour what’s left
of my iridescent heart.

Into the timeless woods I go
where the moonlight illuminates
the infinite peace of things.

I go to the woods to dance barefoot
like a demented shaman in the muck
of the meadows. I go to the woods
as an antidote to modernity, 
to wander at ease among 
the wild geraniums and thickets, 
unearthing the primordial 
savage within. 

I go to the woods, in the words
of Thoreau, “to live deliberately, 
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what
it had to teach, and not, when
I came to die, discover that
I had not lived.”

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