Into the Wild Woods: Beneath the Boughs in Summer
School is out for summer, a perk of the job that seems most glorious as the summer stretches out before me, even if it is rather damp at the moment. I don’t know who has been looking forward to it most, pupils or us staff. Blake had it wrong in his poem, The Schoolboy, we adults also do not like to be cooped up in class on a beautiful summer morning either!
While the weather is wet and warm, the woods are lush and green. Later on, when the summer heat takes hold proper, the ferns will die back, brown and crispy and in places, the very air will be heavy with the scent of wood spice. Not this morning though. No, beneath the boughs this morning, it’s damp and warm. It rained all night the night before, but the ground must have been parched, for it isn’t as waterlogged and muddy as I’d feared.
It’s been a while since I’ve been here, no more than a couple of weeks, and yet it feels different. Time is a funny thing out in the woods, seeming to stand still and yet be constantly shifting, an ode to the ever turning wheel of the year and the ebb and flow of the seasons. Where before the grass was short, now it is long and green and fresh. Wildflowers in pinks, purples, yellows and whites mingle in with the grasses and attract the buzzing bees and other flying creatures that hover and hang in the warm morning air.
We’ve been doing Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at school this term, and this morning beneath the boughs, it feels as though I have stepped into Oberon and Titania’s woodland realm. Sunlight filters through the canopy, takes on a golden green glow that catches on the wings of dragonflies and bees. Song birds call out unseen from the canopy and shrubs, their song a melodious interlude between the harsh call of the crow and the loud shriek of pheasants, all against the gentle backdrop of the breeze through the treetops. When a gust gets a bit of umph behind, it makes the trees groan and creak as they sway, the sound perhaps eerie to the unaccustomed ear.
This is a working wood, with many rows of pine, and yet in those older, wilder parts, there still grow the oak, the beech and the hazel, all steeped in magic, in folklore. The beech is one, queen to the Oak King if such imagery speaks to your own soul. Trees of fairies, witches and more, the woods teem with life of all kinds, and that life speaks to something within us, so that we enshrine the magic of such places in stories that scare and delight in equal measure, for the woods reminds us that we too are wild things. They beckon to us to come closer, dare us to step off that beaten track and be led astray to delightful wonder and ecstasy in the rediscovery of self.
It is this connection to land, wherever it may be that is vital. It needn’t be the wild wood, nor somewhere far and fancy, but connecting to the land where we live is one way in which we can begin to rediscover and reclaim our wild selves once more.
Check out Emma’s book Reclaiming Ourselves here.
EMMA KATHRYN
Emma Kathryn, practises traditional British witchcraft, Vodou and Obeah, a mixture representing her heritage. She lives in the sticks with her family where she reads tarot, practises witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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