Quiet is hard to come by in the constant thrum of modern life. Something is always available to fill the silence, always ready to rush in with distraction and demand attention. We forget to seek out places that let us sit a while in a breeze that lifts the leaves and lingers in our hair rustling the strands. We forget to find outside sanctuaries that make you want to whisper because your regular voice seems unruly in the serenity of pastures and creeks.
In the natural world, I often feel like Godzilla, oversized and stepping on everything, crushing villages of grass, cities of insects, and labyrinths of branches.
My voice disturbs the birds forcing them to take flight in a rush of fear. My stride sends animals scurrying. None of it makes me feel powerful, only brutish. I am a clanging symbol until I am able to align myself with the quiet. Finally I settle down, taking lessons from the trees who always stand with infinite patience quietly communicating with each other through their networks of limbs and roots. The best travelers always take their cues from their surroundings. When in nature, do as the trees do.
In Washington D.C., you can blend into the noise, becoming small and cog-like; in nature, you are all horn and blare, disrupting and leaving marks just by talking and laughing and walking.
Down the road from D.C.’s cacophony of ideas and beliefs, swirling in the air like a hovering whirlwind loud and insistent, there is a place of profound quiet. George Washington’s Birthplace is a sanctuary of silence preserving 538 acres of cow pastures, burial grounds, walking trails, and beaches settled by the Washington family in the 17th century.
And while D.C. celebrates our first President with a monument seeking the sky and striking the view in every direction, his birthplace is a rustic reminder that George Washington was forged in the woods. The obelisk here in the Virginia countryside is a humble halfling awkwardly standing out of place amidst the trees, those woodsy obelisks that shade and shed with the seasons.
An historic site always summons the spirits. The museum that accompanies the lands aids the apparitions; outfitting them, placing them in tableaus so that when you walk the lands, they seem to walk with you. Here is little George, unaware of history, growing aimlessly like children do, unmarked for revolution on this quiet homestead in Virginia. Some might believe a certain star was in the sky when he was born or maybe a planet was in motion or the gods touched him. Maybe even the trees blessed him.
Washington’s birthplace may offer an ode to nature, but we don’t study Washington for his life in the woods like we might Thoreau. The poets and writers seek nature for metaphors and mirrors while others seek nature for profit and treasure. Washington was a little bit of both. He was a way finder surveying, appreciating, and mapping the land making a path to prosperity through it.
After serving our country for decades, surely Washington must have found respite in the peace and quiet of a forest later in his life. He must have understood the necessity of nature to bring a life back into balance after war and strife. Perhaps the trees eased the burden of his destiny.
On January 6, 2021, I wrote in my journal, “Today I will go down to the ocean for solace and answers, to commune with the gods, for “in water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.” Those last words are from Mary Oliver who on paper I can ask to complete my sentences for me. What a gift to feel we can converse with the writers we love!
She, who was in constant conversation across the centuries with Wordsworth, Whitman, and Emerson and who understood that nature held the secrets to all truth and philosophy. She, who knew, all its parts are worthy of attention: the black snake, the summer day, the egret, the first snow.
For Oliver, “attention is the beginning of devotion.” Her notes about the natural world easily become fodder for painted wooden signs, pillow messages, and Instagram shots that distill the long form into short pieces of wisdom leaving so much behind.
In her essay “Upstream” Oliver writes about being lost in the woods as a child when she walks away from her parents. This is no fairy tale of fear with witches and wolves and lost little girls. Oliver’s woods, as she wanders further, are full of flowers that keep her company and trees that open her heart and a bear that makes her curious for the secrets he must know. In those woods, as many have before and since, she found herself and longed always to be lost in the woods.
Oliver admonishes us to teach the children and “give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.” She encourages us to send the children upstream, so they can learn to love “this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.”
In our travels, the cities like Washington, come hard and fast with multiple venues for entertainment. Like carnival barkers, they entice and distract. But sometimes, it’s important to escape the city, to wander the backroads, get a little lost and stumble into the woods. When D.C. exhausts us with its history, Washington’s birthplace on the Potomac is a quiet haven worthy of our attention.