The Forest Knows My Name

The forest has always spoken to me.

Not in words — never in words — but in the way the air shifts when you step beneath the trees. In the way sound changes. In the way your shoulders drop without permission, like your body remembers something your mind forgot.

I didn’t learn that alone.

I learned it walking beside my dad.

Our hikes were never about distance or speed. We didn’t measure them in miles or steps. We measured them in pauses — places where he’d stop, tilt his head, and listen to something I couldn’t yet hear.

“Just pay attention,” he’d say.

To what, I didn’t know. But I did.

To the crunch of leaves.
To the creak of branches swaying above us.
To the way the forest never felt empty, even when no one else was there.

I noticed how my dad walked differently in the woods. Slower. Lighter. Like he was visiting someone’s home instead of passing through it. He didn’t dominate the trail — he respected it.

And without realizing it, so did I.

As I got older, the forest became the only place where my thoughts untangled themselves without effort. Where grief softened instead of sharpened. Where questions didn’t demand answers right away.

It was there — beneath tall trees and filtered light — that I first understood something I couldn’t explain at the time:

God doesn’t always shout.
Sometimes He whispers through what He made.

The wind through pine needles.
The steady patience of roots gripping the earth.
The way the forest takes everything — fallen branches, decay, broken things — and turns them back into life.

I later learned how deeply Indigenous cultures understood this long before I ever did. How American Indians didn’t see the earth as something to conquer, but something to listen to. Something alive. Something sacred.

They knew what my dad seemed to know instinctively — that nature isn’t separate from the Creator. It’s His voice, layered and constant, if you’re willing to slow down enough to hear it.

When my dad was gone, the forest became harder to enter at first.

Every trail felt like a memory I couldn’t outrun. Every quiet moment echoed with absence. But eventually, it became the place where I felt closest to him again — and to God.

Because the same stillness that held us both was still there.

I still hike the way he taught me.
I still stop when the forest tells me to.
I still listen with more than my ears.

And every time I step beneath the trees, I feel it — that gentle reminder that I am known. Held. Seen. Part of something older and steadier than pain.

The forest doesn’t rush me.
God doesn’t either.

And somehow, walking those trails, I hear Him most clearly — not above me, but all around me.