I went to the forest during my lunchtime. It was colder today and light rain was starting, but I haven’t been to the forest since Sunday (actually, I have walked in a forest on Tuesday, but it wasn’t my forest and I was’t alone, so not the same) and I was getting curious to see if the red trilliums were yet in bloom. So, I went to the forest.

The trilliums are still not in bloom and the forest looks like it is taking time to wake up – during this time of year the change from winter to early spring to actual spring is so subtle that one has to check every couple of days and look closely not to miss it. If I wasn’t looking closely, I would have surely missed Carolina springbeauties at the side of the walking path, neatly tucked behind a protruding root.

I stopped for about five minutes to listen to the birds: in the absence of the cardinals, the robins were leading the choir, aided by the goldfinches, black-eyed juncos, two smaller kinds of woodpeckers and brown creepers. I thought I saw a red squirrel dashing from a tree, but it must have been my imagination.

Then, as I was heading back, it happened. I saw a big bird take flight from a tree, cross my path and settle on another tree, then take flight from there to settle a little further. It was about a size of a crow, only more elongated and elegant, with striking white spots on its black wings and a head so red it seemed almost out of place in our northern forest. It was a woodpecker, but I never saw one so large, so magnificent and so silent. I gasped and stood still as long as I could see him among the trees.

I spent some time in the afternoon looking at different pictures and descriptions of woodpeckers to finally determine that the one I saw was a pileated woodpecker – le grand pic – one of the largest and most impressive in the family, the one that prefers the woods to the domestic comfort of the backyards.

The woodpecker made me realize something. Over the years, in my teens and twenties, I was going to church, hoping to meet God there, to experience some kind of rapture or epiphany that would take me away and outside of myself. I sometimes found it, or thought I found it in the communal worship in the evangelical church, but I left it because it started feeling like too much noise and not enough mystery. Finding this elusive experience in the orthodox church was easier. The experience there was permeated by the smell of incense, the solemn vocal music and the painted faces of the saints. Everyone moved around me in some mysterious communion and even though I always felt utterly and deeply out of place, I also felt this bigger-than-me presence that brought me to tears every time.

Now, the woods have become my church. I don’t go there for a walk or excercise or even a naturalist exploration. I come to experience communion with something bigger than me, a rapture, a moment of pure awe and adoration. Like with any church, it doesn’t happen all the time, but even when it fails to appear, the feeling of wholeness and healing is always there. Meeting the woodpecker today was a moment of pure, unadulterated worship.

The difference between the forest and a church is that in my church-inspired experience I was never 100 percent sure that the epiphany I just had was not a product of my wishful thinking, that I didn’t fake it and then convinced myself it was real. The woodpecker, on the other hand, was real. I saw it and admired it and came out of the woods altered and knowing that what I just saw and experienced was real.

The woodpecker must be sleeping somewhere in the forest, as I am sipping wine and writing this. It doesn’t care about my search for God or its own role in my spiritual awakening. And maybe for the first time I am looking for God outside of myself. It feels new and real.