Am I as old as I am? Maybe not. Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down. Yesterday I was seven in the woods, a bandage covering my blind eye, in a bedroll Mother made me so I could sleep out in the woods far from people. A garter snake glided by without noticing me. A chickadee landed on my bare toe, so light she wasn't believable. The night had been long and the treetops thick with a trillion stars. Who was I, half-blind on the forest floor who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight years later I can still inhabit that boy's body without thinking of the time between. It is the burden of life to be many ages without seeing the end of time.
Sleeping out in the woods in a bedroll his mother made him to be away from people... I empathize. My mother made me bedrolls to help me pull back from the others where I could rest. Though a dark forest with snakes and birds could be somebody’s nightmare, here the chickadee is light and the garter snake is just going about its business. If you are alive and conscious you probably know your own seven year old still wrapped warmly in a blanket. The only path to the woods is through feeling weightless and letting go.