Forest Bathing – Redwoods National Forest, California

The forest speaks in whispers

I am silent while she speaks

Her scent perfumes the air

and I am intoxicated

The feat of Yosemite was over and we were back on the road, beaming with gratitude and left in wonderment.  The fires prevented us from venturing north towards the Sierra foothills into Mount Shasta, and Lassen Volcanic Park, so we returned to our California coastal highway.  Despite the cold, we were always feeling our best, able to breathe the essence of the ocean and be with its expansiveness.  Some of the sites along the rugged coast held a misty and otherworldly air, and we camped along its shores two nights until we could reach our Redwood National Forest drive.

After strenuous hikes, the meandering forests here were extremely welcoming.  The iconic redwoods towered over us and their reddish tint glowed subtly in the sun peaking its way through canopy-tops.  We walked meditatively through the quiet forest paths, barely seeing another passerby.  Drawn to a particular tree, we would feel its pulse with our outstretched hands…sit at the base of one, lean on it…listen for it to speak through us in its own unique way.  Without any effort, our bodies calibrated to their mighty presence.  For me, their anchoring presence was the grounding remembrance I needed to help bring me back to balance after months of living in a small van with another person.

It was during our time with the Redwoods that I learned the term:  Forest Bathing and apparently, there are forest bathing meetups all over the world.  Shinrin yoku, roughly translated as Forest Bathing, is a principle coined in Japan in the early 1990’s.  It’s all about walking through nature to connect and center one’s self.  Essentially, therapy.  I’ve always, always felt more aligned with myself after having walked the beach, and walking through the trees is no different.  By tuning into the essence of nature, experiencing it through the senses we can all feel more harmony and bring that into our daily lives.

In homage to the trees, I will leave you with one of my favorite Herman Hesse prose pieces:

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

-Herman Hesse-  Wandering