Faithbook: Church of the Trail - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

Church of the Trail

My roommate told me earlier this week that when poet Billy Collins came to UNC a while back, he said there were really only three kinds of poems. The first is "I love you so much, but it hurts so bad," the second is "Dang it, we're all going to die," and the third is "I went into the woods and felt a little religious." I've tried to find holes in his argument but I'm pretty sure that one of these accurately classifies every poem ever written. As an English major I like to operate under the assumption that my life is also poetic in some sense of the word, so last week I realized I hadn't had enough of feeling "a little religious" lately, and decided to follow Billy Collins' archetypal theory and venture into the woods.

Myriad factors combined to make my last week less than top-notch. I hadn't been to church in a while and was feeling generally disconnected from everything besides my laptop and midterm study guides. When a few people announced at cross country practice that they were heading to a wooded trail area near campus called Carolina North to help "remove exotic invasive species," I decided to forego my paper-writing ambitions for the afternoon and spend three hours in the woods.

The cross country club uses the trails pretty heavily, so we try to volunteer out there a few times a semester. I went along last spring and ended up feeling kind of bored and annoyed by walking around digging out invasive plants. It was an effort that seemed futile. The plants would grow back anyway and Carolina North was fighting a losing battle against random seeds from every garden in Chapel Hill. But I decided to give it a try again, and with the phrase "I went into the woods and felt a little religious" bouncing around in my mind, I put on my bandanna and dirty jeans and got ready to dig.

There were only five of us out there so we spread out quite a bit and for a while I could turn a 360-degree circle and see nothing but trees. I thought about the whole forest and all the seeds that had blown in from gardens and multiplied and multiplied again. Then I thought about the whole world and all the seeds flying around in the air and stuck to the bottom of everyone's shoes and eaten up and dispersed by every animal and how ridiculous it was that we were even attempting to stop this huge overwhelming process. Then, since we're reading Paradise Lost in my Milton class right now, I thought about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, who Milton has labor to keep the garden from overgrowing, even before the fall. And then, since I was also trying to feel "a little religious," I thought about how all the invasive plants were like sins and doubts, constantly springing up because we are human. I wasn't going to get all the invasive plants pulled up, even in the half-mile radius around me. But if Adam and Eve labored in Eden even before they had sinned at all, the least I could do was take my shovel and try.

I kept thinking about Carolina North and the forest and all the plants even after we left, and I got my friend to drive me out there again this weekend so we could do our long run on the trails. I've discovered nothing new, of course--Billy Collins would say I'm just another in a line of many "poets" who has gone into the woods and felt a little religious. The guys from our cross country team do a Sunday morning run they call "Church of the Trail," a long run in lieu of an actual service that they say is all the organized religion they need. Though I've suggested they should sometime give "Church of the Jesus" a try as well, I think they might in a way be on to something. There is something about venturing in amongst trees that are taller than you and plants that outnumber you, and as any poet following Collins' third archetype would attest, the possibilities for metaphor are endless. The image of those millions of invasive plants stuck with me, just like the image of Adam and Eve gardening in Paradise Lost. Today I prayed in church that God would give me a good spiritual shovel and a venturous heart and grant me that peace that certain little religious feeling that only "Church of the Trail" can provide.

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