This morning there was something about the quality of light on this path in the local woods that brought me back to walking country lanes during childhood summers spent on my Uncle’s farm. The empty grassy path, with only birdsong disturbing the silence, had the same feeling of nature untamed. Those long ago summer days seemed wild and untamed too with hours on end to explore and roam.
Wendell Berry describes so beautifully the soothing powers of wild natural environments in his poem The Peace of Wild Things:
‘When despair for the world grows in me…
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things.’
Describe a time in your life when you sought peace in the power of nature perhaps walking on a beach or lying under a favourite tree. Describe the place, what it means to you now or meant to you then. Where do you now go to rest in ‘the peace of wild things’?