Finding My Way Back

A Healing Journey Back to My Body and Back to the Woods

Stephanie Jones

Jun 25, 2024

Stretching for the Peace

by Stephanie Jones

if the falling

of a tree

should ever take my life

then mourn

for us both,

two mere mortals

rooted with earth

stretching for the peace

of the sky

A Place

It’s hard to know where to begin, but I think I’ll start with Lake Herrick.

There is no beginning, you know, we always have to start right in the middle.

Lake Herrick is a human-made lake on the campus of the University of Georgia, created in 1982 as a recreational area for folks on campus and around Athens, Georgia. More than 60 wooded acres back up to the lake, with miles of walking and biking trails along streams, around a pond, near a ropes course, across hilltops, around a giant chimney, adjacent to a practice football field where the band meets, behind some residential housing, and next to this small city’s highway called the loop.

If the sun is shining, people will be on the softball fields, running on the rugby pitch, playing cricket, throwing frisbees, fishing off the dock, laying in their swimsuits on the grassy hill, chilling in hammocks in the trees, and – of course – walking or running on the shady trails.

If the clouds are raining, there is less human activity overall but oftentimes a big uptick in the activity of our other earthkin: families of geese eating along the water’s edge, an owl perched quietly on a low branch, earthworms out in the open, gnats flying in waves, a fish leaping out of the lake. Of course there will still be some people around, maybe admiring the heron, watching the droplets ripple across the water, enjoying the quiet.

The forest at Lake Herrick has offered me solitude for as long as I can remember since moving to Athens in 2007.

I began teaching at the University of Georgia in 2007, driving past Lake Herrick Drive nearly every day, but I can’t remember when I first visited the forest. Maybe I always felt it, maybe I felt it before I arrived in town, maybe there was never a first visit but a reuniting of a human with forest kin who have always known I would come.

Breathing with a Healing Space

Pulling into the winding drive brings a palpable sense of relief, and I have driven back to those woods on early mornings when I had fifteen minutes to spare before a meeting, or on late-but-still-light evenings after teaching a night class, and every time in between. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get out of my car, I would just turn off the engine, open the windows, and breathe.

You know, breathing really can do so much good for us. I don’t mean that quick shallow breath so many people get used to doing like an automated machine. I mean that beauty-full breath you pull into your torso and feel moving downward through your lower back and outward past your ribs until it eases into a gentle exhale.

That breathing, yes.

Other days I would meander through the woods for hours, literally hours, listening to the hawks call one another, watching frogs jump into the water, moving sticks out of the path, and smiling at the trees filling with spring leaves.

A friend and I walked nearly 12 miles at a time on those trails more than once during Covid.

Remember the lockdown? When being outdoors proved to be a gift of a solution to a potentially deadly problem?

Sometimes my friend and I met twice a day to walk at Lake Herrick during those weeks, and we often saw the same people walking or riding their bikes or having picnics. I remember waving and smiling from a distance as I would see students I knew who were also suffering from isolation, fear, loneliness, and so much more. I always felt better knowing they had Lake Herrick.

I even held classes at Lake Herrick during Covid so I could meet with my students in person and show them a place where they will always be welcome and belong.

Over the years I have likely introduced hundreds of students to Lake Herrick and the Oconee Forest trails. I’ve had so many classes meet there for special gatherings, and have encouraged students to check out the trails every semester. Last fall a graduate class gathered in the woods on Halloween night to listen and look as a way of sharpening our research and inquiry practices. Darkness fell fast that evening and we all walked back to the parking lot together, some of us marveling at the feeling of darkness in the forest and others of us full of fear (but supported by a big group).

A student from that class recently told me that was her first time at Lake Herrick and she had gone back nearly every day since then.

She had been watching the resident heron.

I love that heron too.

Honestly, one of my biggest accomplishments as a professor in these 17 years at UGA might be urging people to care for themselves by finding ways to be present, to be with nature, to slow down and breathe, and to be conscious and mindful of their presence with this place called Athens where we live.

Then, 124 days ago today, a beautiful young woman was violently attacked and killed on those beloved trails, beneath those beloved trees, among those beloved birds, beyond the sight of the beloved lake.

Forty-Five Days

My breath stopped, my body froze, and every muscle tightened on Thursday February 22, 2024 at 2:21pm as I read the “Special Safety Update” email that arrived in my Inbox.

A panicked roommate reported her friend didn’t come home from a morning run.

She had been running at Lake Herrick.

Police responded and found her body, unresponsive.

I first wrote this section of this piece on April 8^th, 2024, a full 45 days after the energy of this trauma lodged itself in my body. What had been happening in those forty-five days? What happened to my body-mind-spirit? Where did time-space go after that email?

And yet, today – June 25^th, 2024 marks 124 days and I can still ask the same question. But today, I think I can find my way back to finishing the work of stringing these words behind one another, stitching my racing heart and clenched stomach and hot throat back together with language.

A giant, sharp-edged boulder began growing in my body, pushing through my heart, blocking off air in my throat, pressing against my eyes and ears.

The nightmares began.

The sleepless nights were exhausting.

I didn’t recognize Laken Riley when her picture was released, which meant that I wasn’t the one who introduced her to those trails where her life would end. The tiny bit of relief that came with that knowledge offered no reprieve from grieving her death, the violence to a place that had offered so much serenity, and the downward spiral.

Family members who had always worried about me spending time in the woods alone were more vocal: They didn’t want me to go.

I didn’t want me to go.

But I also didn’t know how to live without being in the woods.

Seventy-Eight Days

It took me 78 days to walk in the woods without nightmares, since a man violently took the life of that beautiful young woman, Laken Riley. As a runner, she likely – like me – found peace and solitude by herself in the woods.

There is nothing like the peace of being all alone with the woods.

Those 78 days could be a book of internal conflict, arguments with and pleas by my family, panic attacks in the middle of the night, sitting at the edge of the woods unable to walk in, weeping in the mornings, following small groups on trails, carrying sharp small pieces of branches as a potential weapon, seeing every man I passed as a predator…

I think you get the point here, right? But I’ll carry on because even if I filled pages with the challenges and feelings and visceral responses it would never be enough to express how bodies hold onto, respond with, and metabolize traumatic energy.

I was doing a lot more yoga in those 78 days because I thought it could replace my daily hikes (it can’t), walking with my husband through the exact part of the trails where this sweet spirit was taken and sitting with the trees who witnessed it all, sleeping with an alarm I could activate if someone came into the bedroom, walking only short trails along the periphery of the woods or only walking with my sweet grandpup Eddie or my daughter or my husband or a friend, and resisting going on new hikes that I wanted so badly to try.

Finding My Way Again

Healing doesn’t just take time, it takes journeys, embodied risks, visceral suffering, bodily release, energy dislodging, inching back into places where great harm has been done, slowing our breath, re-regulating our parasympathetic nervous system.

We inch our way out of a valley and roll back in.

We smile our way into the light and find darkness again.

We hum and chant and sing and jump and stretch and walk and fling our arms around to support our body’s metabolizing of the energy that is not serving us, and we find ourselves frozen again.

Every place where we spend time, every creature we encounter, every human we see becomes a part of our healing assemblage, even when they have no idea how powerful their encounters are.

And then one day, maybe 124 days later, we might find our way back to our trail listening to the rustling of a squirrel we cannot see, feeling the thick humidity on our skin, and putting one foot in front of the other even when the tiniest hint of our chest tightening registers.

We carry on.

I have thought so much about my own up and down and inside-out journey over the last several months and wondered how the healing journeys of her mother and father and family and friends are going.

If you are someone who loved Laken Riley, I think of you often and I hope you are healing.

Then I take a deep inhale and feel my breath pushing through my body and exhale slowly sending love and healing to everyone and every place that needs it. And as I pull up to my favorite parking spot at Lake Herrick, I am filled with gratitude for everyone in our community who has dared to re-enter Lake(n) Herrick trails to find some peace there and maybe even fill it with the healing energies of love and laughter – our true resistance to violence.

Healing Among Trees

by Stephanie Jones

if the violence

of a man

should ever take my life

then send him away

to a cottage

in the woods

with daily visits

from witchery women

clearing his chakras

cleansing his energy