Into the Woods...
Not long ago, in the snowy depths of winter, I found myself alone in the woods, in a new house and a new town feeling betwixt and between. I was an expat living in Vietnam for ten months of the year and the other two months in my home country, America, in what felt like a foreign land. I often asked myself how it happened. I spent the last twenty years living an expat life and I was now “home” and I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged. I had four weeks to sort it out.
Day and night passed at lightning speed, the fragrance of jasmine creeping along our veranda in Vietnam lingered while I took in the stark reality of the cold winter landscape before me, as if a movie was fast-forwarding and reversing beyond our picture window. I needed to find a way to see beyond the white, to find the warm light and beauty within the forest, but how?
I stretched out on the couch, my laptop perched on a pillow while a chilly winter wind blew over the mountain to my east and the sunset to my west. I was mindlessly reading up on bird habitats when The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams popped up on my screen. Intrigued, I sat up and tuned in, a nature fix was just what I needed. I purchased the e-book and set myself under the soft glow of a reading lamp for a long winter’s night. The wind slashing against my window was quickly forgotten.
Williams writes about the famous Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park outside of Tokyo and the people who travel to it for shinrin-yoku, also known as “forest bathing”. The practice is based on ancient Shinto and Buddhist practices, to let nature into your body through all five senses. Williams looked at nature and how it relates to our health. She followed researchers on three continents to understand the nature of neuroscience. She writes about how the smell of pine trees can strengthen your immune system, and how listening to birdsong or looking at fractal patterns in nature makes you feel calmer. Five minutes in the forest slow one’s heart rate as the brain quietens. As little as 15 minutes can reduce cortisol levels, 45 minutes can improve cognitive performance and often times people walking in nature for 1.5 hours feel more connected to the world around them. A minimum of five hours a month can make you feel happier overall. I was sold, I needed forest bathing in my life and fast. Where to start?
kis-met noun: kismet /‘kismet,’hiz,met/ destiny; fate
It was kismet. Our local newspaper advertised a “Winter Forest Bathing Class” at the nearby Harris Center for Conservation Education, located in the heart of a 36,000-acre SuperSanctuary of conserved lands. The ad mentioned gentle yoga poses, deep breathing, “coyote walking” and quiet reflections with peaceful rambles across fields and into the woods. I was in.
We were asked to dress warmly for the class and bring along snowshoes and poles. I wondered how snowshoes would work in a gentle yoga pose. Would we have to manage a “tree” pose with snowshoes? One leg standing firmly planted with the other leg bent, heel resting just below my knee in a showshoe while clasping my hands in prayer? My imagination started to play games with me, this could end badly.
Still, I was all in and equally excited to meet new people. Anyone showing up in the dead of winter on a weekday morning to practice forest bathing had to be my kind of person.
The next morning, I pulled into the visitor's parking lot, snow and ice crunching under the weight of my tires. I checked my phone, it was cold, 35F. I wondered if I would be warm enough. It was the first time I thought I might be crazy to be doing this. I looked up as one car parked next to me, then two and three more. My tribe had arrived.
We gathered our belongings quietly, one after another, and made our way to the meeting spot, a welcoming wooden porch outside a building reminiscent of an old New England ski lodge. The scent of pine was enchanting. We met our guides, Susie and Marilyn, two venerable women of the woods, rosy-cheeked and all-knowing. I was put at ease right away. They were enthusiastic and dressed appropriately for the occasion, unlike me, who forgot to wear snow pants. There was no doubt in my mind they would guide us through an extraordinary experience.
Susie asked us to leave our devices behind and to prepare to walk in silence. My breath quickened at the thought, that meant no photographs and no conversation. I could feel a little sprig of doubt curling in my mind as I carried on to our secluded spot in the woods. I was stepping into the unknown, my unknown, my breath ahead of me, a smoky mist, as I walked, the fragrance of jasmine still lingering from my veranda in Vietnam.
We stopped at the forest edge, I turned to peer into the woods, snow hung heavily on limbs of evergreen trees, a light accent against the dark. Snowy edges cuffed the length of the tree trunks as if supporting them to stand tall.
We stood in a circle, six of us including the guides, a few feet between us. Susie explained that to truly immerse ourselves in the experience we had to walk like coyotes…slowly and deliberately…while searching for items that bring us hope. My experience with coyotes thus far was the distant piercing howls I heard at night. At times they were petrifying, especially when they traveled as a pack and called from a dark corner of our property. It wasn’t an animal I felt a particular affinity with and now I had to walk like one. Susie mentioned, “when you start to walk at the pace of a coyote and really pay attention to what is underfoot it is remarkable what you will discover.” What would that be for me? All I could see was snow, so I slowed down, walked very gently, as if in slow motion, left boot, heel down, then toe, a small step forward, right foot, heel down, then toe. My eyes, like a coyote, slowly scanned my surroundings, looking for dark objects against the snow. A short, nubby pinecone lay at the foot of a pine tree. I took off a glove to run my fingers over a tuft of stiff pine needles as I reached down to pick it up, sticky sap gluing my fingers to it, the scent of fresh pine, sending healing messages to my immune system. I picked up a smooth stone and a small weathered stick in the shape of the letter “Y.” Time passed ceremoniously as if some rite of passage had just occurred. Susie called us back. We came together to talk about what we picked up and what it meant to us. I called my collection an ode to the poet, Robert Frost. For there, at that moment, I truly found the road less traveled.
Never breaking our coyote-like stride, slowly, we followed Susie and Marilyn deeper into the forest. The scene unfolded like a page in a black and white sketchbook, I could nearly feel a pencil under my thumb, index, and middle fingers, sketching the soft interplay between light and dark, grey silhouettes running across the paper. One line graceful, the next sharp and exacting, short and long, upward, downward, and sideways movements, a feathery touch here and there to accent the evergreen branches. It was surreal, a pencil was dancing in my thoughts. Was I now thinking like a coyote?
We stopped again, person to person, tree to tree, we were in the thick of it. Marilyn instructed us to stretch out the coyote in us with a gentle yoga pose as we listened to poetry. Fortunately, we did not need snowshoes for the walk. Mary Oliver’s words floated in and around as Marilyn read..
***
“It was early, which has always been my hour to begin looking at the world
and of course, even in the darkness, to begin listening into it,
especially under the pines where the owl lives and sometimes calls out
as I walk by, as he did on this morning. So many gifts!
What do they mean? In the marshes where the pink light was just arriving
the mink with his bristle tail was stalking the soft-eared mice,
and in the pines the cones were heavy, each one ordained to open.
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Little mink, let me watch you.
Little mice, run and run.
Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.”
***
“Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.” A teary watershed was about to flow. I was so utterly blown away by forest bathing and the outer worldliness of it all, I was beyond words. I wondered if I had brought tissues with me.
Just when I thought I couldn’t be any more moved by this experience, I was. Marilyn gave each of us a small mat and instructed us to find a spot to sit and meditate for ten minutes. She said she would ring a bell when the time was up. I was a little confused. Sit in the snow? For ten minutes? Without a phone to photograph this beauty? O ye of little faith. Everyone departed to a nearby spot in the woods and sat down. I looked around and eyed a small knoll with a large pine tree deeply rooted and standing strong. I lay my mat under the tree and sat on it. Legs stretched out, I then fell back, a deep sigh, I could feel my body relax, a slight chill running up my spine. I closed my eyes. And then it happened.
I looked up and was absolutely stunned to see trees hovered over me as if in conversation, pine trees and birds whispering to each other as one branch dipped in the wind, then another. A chorus of pines. I melted into the moment, my tongue clipping a curling fresh breath before descending into a yoga breath, mouth closed, breathing in through the nose, holding….one, two, three, four…and then out through the nose, one, two, three four. If my mat had been a magic carpet I would have reached the clouds by count of four. I couldn’t recall the last time I lay in the snow, was I five, six or seven? When did the adult become the child? Was this what it meant to meditate? What was happening to me? It was surreal. It was lovely. Time was suspended and then…. a soft bell rang in the distance to let us know it was time to gather once again. It was time to come home.
From the look on the other participant's faces, I could tell they had a similar experience to mine. We were glowing as if rays of light were shimmering off our entire being. We had been transported, I am not sure to where but I knew it was where I wanted to be. I went home that day feeling lighter, with a newfound appreciation for the scene outside my window. I embraced it for the secrets I knew it would always hold for me. Most important of all, it felt like home.
What I learned that day was to always be open to new experiences. When in doubt, go into the woods. For there you will always find light.
