Walking toward the Enchanted Wood

There have been evenings when the light has turned everything silver, and like you, I have stopped at a corner and suddenly staggered with the grace of it all. — William Stafford

A time to embrace mystery as my native land.

And silence as my native tongue. – John Kirvan

The spiritual journey of Helen Adams Keller illustrates the words above.

Born in Alabama on June 27, 1880, at the age of nineteen months, she fell ill. When she recovered, she was unable to see any light or objects, and her ears did not conduct sound either through bone or via air. Helen described her next six years:

I had no concepts whatever of nature or mind or death or God. I literally thought with my body. Without a single exception my memories of that time are tactile. . . .

But there is not one spark of emotion or rational thought in these distinct yet corporeal memories. I was like an unconscious clod of earth. There was nothing in me except the instinct to eat and drink and sleep. My days were a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without interest or joy.

Then suddenly, I knew not how or where or when, my brain felt the impact of another mind, and I awoke to language, to knowledge, to love, to the usual concepts of nature, good, and evil. I was actually lifted from nothingness to human life.

The other “mind” that Helen refers to was Anne Mansfield Sullivan. Helen Keller describes the spiritual transformation wrought by her encounter with Other:

Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me,

but it is because they do not see

the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted;

for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart.

Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way,

and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow,

I walk unafraid toward the enchanted wood

where the foliage is always green,

where joy abides,

where nightingales nest and sing,

and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.