returning to the woods
The faint strain of the melody of the song
“Return to Pooh Corner” reached my ears and off went my thoughts, wandering in
the woods…to where great camaraderie is, unbounded by the complexities of what
we have come to consider as life; to where one is reminded of the essential,
the simple joy of loving and being loved, with a heart that is genuine,
unpretentious — The Hundred Acre Woods — a place where the basis of
friendship is not how well one can talk about politics and science, but how one
can talk of even the most nonsensical and be accepted; where the basis of
acceptance is not how one can socially fit in and measure up to everyone’s
expectations, but how one can show his frailty and still be given a chance;
where the basis of giving is not because of the anticipation of getting
something in exchange, but because of the happiness that can be found in
sacrificing for others; and where the reason why one sacrifices is not because
one wants to be recognized, but because one loves.
I spent a few minutes memorizing the lines
of that song and some more hours learning how to play it with the guitar. I was
somehow able to get a glimpse of what Kenny Loggins so artistically pictured
out using the lines of that poetry, but it was not until I got to the woods, to
the house at Pooh Corner, sitting on a couch with Alan Alexander Milne’s “The
House at Pooh Corner” that I was able to fully understand. Behind the childish
illustrations; beyond the outwardly silly lines, further down what we can only
see as a shallow naïve story; is a view of life that only the unsophisticated
can see, an approach to life that only the guileless can do, a response to each
circumstance that only the uncomplicated can give…something that we can only do
when we do not just use our minds but let our hearts feel as well; when we look
at things as would a child, a knack that most of us has sadly lost, a capacity
that we have mistakenly thought of as something to be shoddily tossed aside in
favor of knowledge, wealth, fame and power.
We have failed to maintain the balance and have
lost so much…what we have gained in exchange, we have failed to see, are
immaterial, because we have forgotten the essence of the heart of a child. For
only with a child can another child talk gibberish, and still be embraced as a
friend; only with a child can another child be honest enough to admit his
mistake and imperfection, and still be easily forgiven and warmly received; only
with a child can another child take and not be hounded on giving something in
return; and only with a child can another child feel valued, free from any
other motive but love.
The book is a reminder of our own “woods”, where
each of us used to run around as a child, and of all the things that come along
with it–nursery rhymes, cracked makeshift baseball bats, coloring books,
drawing pads, lost pencils, lullabies, broken toy cars, star gazing, bald
Barbie dolls, favorite pillows and blankets, soiled baseball caps, daydreams,
tree houses, fistfights, baby talk, stubbed toes, picnics, scraped knees, hide
and seek, bleeding noses, missing tooth, new bicycle, nightmares, imaginary
friends, illusory monsters in the closet, pets, friends, family, bedside
stories, all the made-up characters, which is in fact why Winnie the Pooh, the
bear with the very little brain, timorous Piglet, officious Rabbit, grouchy Eeyore,
playful Tiggur, worldly wise Owl, motherly Kangga, darling Rooh, Christopher
Robin and the rest of the gang came to being, and many more; the song a
testimonial that we can choose to keep all these with us, and that when we take
the wrong turn, we can always return to that woods.
Loggins wrote that lyric long ago, left it
in a corner along with all the memories of his childhood, but returned for it
when his child came, seeing the world again through the eyes of what he once
was, a boy. His bundle of joy reminded him of how he was, how he saw things as
a child, so simply yet untainted and thus oddly satisfying. It brought him back
to where doing the mundane, (for those who have gone out of the woods and
willfully disregarded it, and to those who have been there but have not enough
memory of it), can bring so much delight to those who have managed to keep the
child within them, and those who have finally found their way back to that
house at Pooh Corner.
