In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. [Emerson]
I still don't know what Wordsworth meant, though I appreciate the sentiment: the aging adult turning child again for play, for love, for acknowledgement?
Or is it, actually, that the child fathers? Leads the man into an honest sense of who he is when he's free to be himself, as he did before he cared who he'd become: the child before he was a man.
There is a third alternative: the kind of father the man becomes begins when he is just a tripping child full of wonder & fear.
But all of this is less important than a morning spent walking in the woods on the first day of Fall on a first field trip for both father & son.
On that path in the woods: the child, the man are equals: both now & then.
Walking, looking up at migrating families of butterflies, he unexpectedly grabbed onto my hand. I shrunk, not out of fear, but out of wonder. In that moment there were no words that could be worth saying, however poetic or philosophical, just two boys in the woods.
He lead; I followed.
He lead; I followed.
