Collaborating with a forest

Reflections on guiding others towards the Others

You can listen to me read this piece here:

Back in April, I spent 9 days in the hemlock forests of western Massachusetts, learning a method for guiding mindful outdoor experiences. I came home and started offering the work every Thursday morning at a local Evanston forest. After 19 sessions, the weekly class is now on hiatus during the cold season. (Weekend workshops still to come, for those who know how to dress warmly!)

The method I learned is a yoga-inflected form of a family of practices variously called nature therapy, forest bathing, ecotherapy, etc. The format is elegantly simple: get oriented to your exact place and time, wake up your body with movement, slow down your breathing, enliven your senses and then go forth and have an encounter with the More Than Human world. Usually this involves slow sauntering, quiet sitting and often playful exploration. It can be done individually, but it really comes alive as a group process, where each participant contributes their unique perspective to an act of collective knowing. Common effects include slowing way down, insight into personal dilemmas and therapeutically-expanded perspectives.

Harbert-Payne Forest, November

Not long before I started my program, I became aware of a sliver of forest very near my house called Harbert-Payne Woods. It's filled with cottonwood, black cherry, box elder and a ton of invasive buckthorn. A group of volunteers, which I have joined, has been faithfully clearing buckthorn and planting more diverse species for years. 'Tis a scrappy little forest, stoically growing from heavy clay soil excavated to make the adjacent North Shore Canal, then later used for barracks and brickyards.

Evidence of humans is everywhere, from cages protecting young trees from browsing deer to the buzz of engines on nearby McCormick Boulevard. It's far from a pristine old growth forest, but it's also more complex and unruly than landscaped yards. It is a vital, unique expression of this local ecosystem, the strange collaboration of humans, plants, animals and elementals that is this lakeside suburban land. It is also easy to visit regularly.

Rather than go farther afield to one of the larger forest preserves, I decided to offer an outdoor class here every week, both as a practical measure to make it convenient for folks to attend, but also to test my conviction that local nature offers us something that once-in-a-lifetime visits to national parks cannot: an ongoing relationship. To me, this is the heart of the work: building and sustaining a personal relationship with the More Than Human world.

Nature therapy is often marketed by pointing out all the proven health benefits of spending time in nature. There is indeed extensive research that shows all kinds of positive changes from time in nature, or even just viewing images of nature on a screen. But I think we do well to be suspicious of the urge to treat nature as another kind of medicine, as is well articulated in this article by JB McKinnon. He quotes environmental psychologist Peter Kahn, who wonders:

Would you ask the question, ‘How much exposure does a husband need to his wife to have good outcomes: healthy heart, lower stress, mental restoration?’ ‘Do wives need different amounts or kinds of exposures to their husbands?’ ... A dose is not a relationship. It’s not about co-existence. It’s not about interconnectedness.

So this will not be a listicle about the "Top 5 Health Boosts from the Forest".

Rather, I'd like to explore some intriguing questions and hopeful themes that emerged from my time spent in communion with Harbert-Payne Woods thus far.

What we seek is close at hand

I spend a lot of my time as a yoga teacher giving explicit instructions about how to move and breathe. Sure, I try to use exploratory language and make suggestions rather than commands, but still, I'm structuring the minute-to-minute activity of my students for much of the class. They traverse a landscape of my design.

Guiding outdoors is refreshingly different. I'm not imparting techniques or designing sequences. Rather, my main role is to create a safe container of time and space that allows folks to let down their guard a bit, then gently point them towards the living world. I may suggest a few exercises to sharpen the senses - sniffing the leave litter, feeling nubbly cottonwood branches, opening peripheral vision - but they are open-ended, impossible to get wrong.

The good news is that we screen-addled moderns only need the lightest bit of encouragement to reawaken our connection to the natural world. I don't need a sales pitch or elaborate methodology. Folks are hungry for an encounter with something real and intimate. And opportunities are everywhere: the scented spring breeze, the dance of shadow and light on cottonwood leaves, ants traversing a crevice in a tree trunk. A shimmering, animate world is just a few deep exhales away.

The cue to allow "soft fascination" is especially helpful. School and work train us in hard fascination, to bound attention firmly to a single subject, such as this essay you're reading right now. Soft fascination is ungoverned and flowing. It revives our natural curiosity that so often gets smothered for the sake of "what needs to be done". Children manifest it abundantly - painfully so when shoes need to be put on to get to school on time. It does strike me as ironic that I spend mornings trying to get my kids to focus more sharply on time boundaries, then go to work and guide adults to do just the opposite.

Why not let your curiosity wander to something outside your window and come back to this essay whenever you please?

Hello again! I wonder what you found yourself drawn to?

Ready for more words? Here we go:

The forest overflows with teachings

After a group spends some time exploring, we get together and share what we're noticing. Time and again, people report that certain facets of the outside world seem to speak directly to their internal questions and yearnings. A tree hollow is found that cradles the body with an unconditional firmness that is not available from a current relationship. Saplings grow diligently in deep shade, despite their long odds, modeling perseverance despite dim prospects. The softness of a bending stem reminds a spine of forgotten suppleness. The forest overflows with teachings if we can soften our filters enough to receive them.

A human-centered explanation of this phenomenon might go something like this: human cognition evolved in relationship to nature. Thought itself is built up from embodied experiences of the world¹. The rich patterns of a forest will therefore resonate with deep structures in the mind, activating connections that otherwise remain dormant in a built environment. Different kind of thoughts become possible in the midst of greater biodiversity.

This is especially likely if we carry an intention to open to the "teachings of the forest", rather than just walking through while listening to a podcast. The scare quotes above show that this perspective doesn't ascribe actual agency to the nonhuman Others. Surely an experience of receiving teachings from a rotting log is a quirk of the evolutionary origins of our mind, a mistaken inference of selfhood akin to seeing a man in the moon?

On the other hand, or hoof, there is the animist view - likely held by the vast majority of humans that ever lived on the planet - that animals, plants, even certain rocks are Persons in their own particular fashion. Therefore it's totally possible to form relationships with them, as with any other person, and even communicate with them. Modernized human have just forgotten how to do it. (Whether a particular tree cares to give advice to a random interloper is another matter of course.) I recommend The Emerald Podcast episode, "Animism is Normative Consciousness" for an extended meditation on this topic.

I don't have a settled opinion on this question of worldviews. The title of this Substack, Within Us and Without Us, names what to me is a central puzzle of life as a conscious human: how to understand and skillfully traverse the permeable border between “inside” and “outside”? Do the trees “really” offer teachings to me, or is that an overlay of human concepts on something more mysterious?

I do notice a steady drumbeat of scientific research revealing sophisticated cognition in unexpected places, such as fish and plants. Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of the material world, is now actively debated in the academy after being dismissed as a hippie notion for decades. There is a growing movement to grant certain environmental areas the legal status of personhood so they can be represented in legal proceedings, such as in New Zealand, where the Whanganui River was declared to be a legal person in 2017. All encouraging signs that the facade of human exceptionalism may be cracking open.

Free existential therapy

One common element of many modern nature practices is the Sit Spot: planting your butt in one place for a good long time, minimizing your movements, paying generous attention to the world around you. Whilst seated in a spot, these lines by Gary Snyder often come to mind:

As the crickets' soft autumn hum 
is to us 
so are we to the trees 
as are they 
to the rocks and the hills.

Contrasting tempos become palpable as I sit still. My thoughts swarm more slowly than the circling gnats, leap in time with the squirrels and birds, blossom and wither rapidly beneath the patient trees.

I find this reminder of my contingent, fleeting existence quite bracing; a bittersweet tonic for my human arrogance. But it’s not everyone’s cup of herbal tea. The forest is not really a safe place, certainly not in the currently-fashionable sense of the term. It is not concerned with our feelings or comfort, which allows important truths to come forward.

Particularly: death is coming. The rotting logs, the trampled plants, the rabbit carcass eviscerated by a falcon: all offer irrefutable testimony that this being alive is a limited-time engagement. I think this an important corrective for the death-phobia of our modern technocracy², where death often happens off-stage in a sterile hospital room and feels somehow like failure. “If only I’d exercised more, taken different herbs, found a different doctor… somehow I could have avoided this?” Is death just for suckers?

What if the leaves avoided falling through some clever medical intervention? Soil would be deprived of nutrients; the tree would risk losing limbs in an ice storm. What if rabbits got so crafty they could never be caught by a hawk? The predators would starve; the rabbits would overpopulate and deplete the understory. If we sit a while on the forest floor, the necessity of death shines forth. Decay is utterly natural and needed, as are life’s efforts to avoid it.

Does a tree know that its death will feed countless other beings? Does the pepper plant in my front garden feel relief when the temperatures finally drop, signaling an end to its efforts to bear fruit? I don’t know. I ask these questions and no easy answers come. Maybe my ears are too full of human language to hear. Maybe the questions assume a style of cognition that doesn’t apply to my rooted kin. Whatever the case, observing the intimate embrace of life-and-death in the forest helps me imagine how I might aspire to meet death³ when it comes for me and my kin: acceptance, wonder, and generosity towards those who may grow from my dispersal. May it be so!

What next?

As winter approaches and holidays ramp up, I am taking a pause from leading sessions to renew my own outdoor practice, tend some fires, and cook up plans for 2023 - including some winter explorations and an overnight retreat somewhere close to Chicago in May. I hope to resume weekly classes come spring. Stay tuned for details.

PS - I am keeping a list of all the books I mention at Bookshop.org. I get a pittance if you buy the book through them, and Jeff Bezos cries. Might find something worth giving for the holidays?

1. See The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram and The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson.

2. If you’d like to fertilizer your contemplation of death, I recommend Stephen Jenkinson’s bracing work Die Wise and Atul Gawande’s gentler Being Mortal.

3. Nature therapy could fit really well in a hospice program, if the logistics could be worked out. I’d love to pursue this at some point.