Magical Moments in Nature

When I was younger, I used to play outside a lot which I believe many other people did as well, including Wordsworth, Teale, and Twain. There is something that also continues to connect us to the nature around us. Wordsworth, the romantic poet, in his poem: Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, shares the idea of having this childhood air and wonder around nature and when he is a child in Tintern Abbey everything is magical. Upon going there again with all of his new knowledge gained he finds himself not at that same wonder he once had, but it’s now through his little sister. This is my story of that childhood wonder and now how my viewpoint has changed but how i’ll always remember that moment, that day when the sun was in the sky shinning a little too bright and mud was halfway up my calves.

When I was younger I went with my best friend, her brother, her mom, and two family friends out into the “woods” behind our neighborhood. It was early in the morning, it was the time of the year when the snakes wouldn’t get you if you went into their domain. We set out for those trees behind the neighborhood facisnated not ever having explored back there. Enticed because to both of our other sides was a cemetery and corn fields. There was an allure of the woods.

We go out there and we just walk and the mud is engulfing us but we don’t mind because we’re here together doing something our little nine year old selves always wanted to do. Maddy, my best friend, was struggling, but her younger brother was struggling even more and ended up having to be carried. Even with the sludge it was pure fun.

We got to the other side and there was this big house with a bench swing out in the big yard. To my nine year old self it was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, the sun was shining so nicely upon it and I felt joy and accomplishment.

Turning around to go back into the neighborhood the family friends took a different way, a way with much less mud, but much less bonding, but that’s okay we let them. We were on our adventure. It’s like that book “we’re going on a bear hunt,” pure bliss and pure imagination.

I wrote about this experience in my seventh grade English class and my teacher really loved it, even showing it to my math teacher. At the time I knew nothing about Wordsworth and Teale and how they say that maybe we lose the sense of wonder because we become practical and we grow up, but they also tell us to take that sense of childlike wonder into our occupation. To have a little glint of times that came before, times that we weren’t swallowed up by real life. Thinking back to those moments in the woods.

The Lost Woods by Edwin Way Teale

“I was at once enchanted and fearful.”

“…was the endless challenge of the unknown…”

“the image of that somber woods returned a thousands times in memory.”

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

“These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: / But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; / And passing even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration…”