Forest Bathing, part two

“I’m really interested in the psychological side of things,” Maggie continued. “The physiological things—you know, lower blood pressure and pulse rate, respiratory rate—I think that’s all common sense. I’ve read enough studies with enough people to tell you how this is going to go: Nature is good for you.

“I want to see research bloom in this area for health and wellbeing. Specifically, I’m hoping to see it expand in a spiritual direction,” she followed. We discussed how her 2020 paper, “The Interrelationship of Shinrin-Yoku and Spirituality: A Scoping Review,” meandered away from the well-tread realm of the physiological benefits of forest therapy into the numinous. 

“Researchers discovered spirituality, as a central construct, emerged as a part of a therapeutic process conducted in a natural environment. Even interaction with nature, via gardening, showed a provision of a human-nature relationship that offered development of spiritual well-being,” she and her coauthors wrote. 

Another paper Maggie coauthored, publication forthcoming, picked up where her 2017 review left off, reviewing the literature on shinrin-yoku from 2017–2022. While this paper highlights on a study by study basis ample correlation between the practice of shinrin-yoku and nurturing the human spirit, it wasn’t named or quantified as such: “The literature review revealed a dearth of empirical studies connecting specifically the term SY/nature with spirituality,” reads the paper.

“We weren’t able to find any connection between spirituality and nature in research,” Maggie confirmed on our walk. “Maybe those papers didn’t come up because we didn’t specifically say ‘meditation’ as a key word, but some might argue that meditation is not necessarily spirit. I think sometimes you connect with your spirit in meditation…” 

It’s hard to name spirit let alone define its attributes, needs, environs. When I asked Maggie to try to name what it was she meant when she said she came to the forest to connect with spirit, or what she expected it to show up as in the research she conducted, she shrugged. She was okay with the mystery of it, whatever it was. “Okay, I think it’s all about the breath,” she said, finally. “The in breath, and the out breath. At any given moment it’s all we really have.”

It sounds simplistic, but I think she’s onto something here. It’s something that amazes me each time I consider it, too, so I visit the thought frequently. 

Not only that I have my breath, but that I have my breath because of the trees with which I’m surrounded. And the intimate exchange in which we find ourselves: carbon dioxide for oxygen. Not from trees, generically, but these trees, specifically. And not only the oxygen that supplies us with breath, but the air that carries in its currents and eddies wellness in the form of the beautiful smells of the forest. 

A moment spent in recognition and gratitude for this relationship upon each walk through the forest would probably satisfy the entirety of my spiritual needs, however difficult to enumerate.

Cedars cross-pollinate via wind. Their scents don’t also serve their propagation as is a logical guess. This discovery leaves me not knowing why cedars smell so good, unless only to benefit breathing beings. By inhaling deeply and often of their intoxicating scent I am fortifying my immune system. It floors me. Leaving a few grateful carbon exhalations under such a generous tree seems like a small token of gratitude. Maggie shared my delight at this. 

A bird began shrilling at us. Instantly, Maggie incorporated the sound into her experience. “Like this bird right now, just hearing that beautiful chirping, and how I can connect that with my breath, and the pause of each inhalation and exhalation. How I can carry that sound with me now for a while, and go ‘oh, that’s so beautiful.’ And I think that’s why we really relax around nature sounds: the ocean, the birds.”

We walked quietly for a moment, and she added, “A lot of it is just the peacefulness and the quietude here. And quietude has kind of a spirit to it.” 

“I can’t describe the spiritual connections I feel in the woods. I just get a lot of joy out of being here. This is my sanctuary. This is my church.”

As we continued walking, she greeted one couple by name, knew them from yoga class, one they’d all just attended earlier in the day. She mentioned, over and over, wondering what other people were experiencing as a regular occurrence on her walks.

“I wonder what that woman is here for,” she said by way of example as we passed a lone walker moving in the opposite direction. I was asking Maggie to tell me what her experience was, and it was clear that at least part of that experience was of being a researcher at heart and wanting to set up an informal survey of everyone who walked by, to ask them what they were there for, understand what their experiences were, what needs they came to the forest to have met. 

Maggie did eventually retire from her professorship at the University of San Francisco in 2018, but retirement doesn’t apply to Maggie’s curiosity, nor her work ethic. Since then, she’s debuted as adjunct faculty at the University of Washington, she continues to publish research papers on nature and its implications for the whole of human wellness—she named at least three distinct research topics she’d like to publish on during our ninety-minute conversation—and she is working on a book about awe and nature. 

As we approached the lakeside bench toward the end of our walk together, Maggie introduced the final sense, “The last is taste.” And here she paused.

“I get this question from people a lot,” I said to her, “‘When you say you use all five senses, what are you tasting?’”

“That’s why I brought the tea!” she exclaimed. “I don’t do this every time, but sometimes I have a little tea ceremony. It gives me the opportunity to sit, and look around me, and be even more slow moving through nature,” she said before adding with a laugh, “Am I licking trees? No!”

Maggie attended a forest bathing seminar taught by Amos Clifford, founder and CEO of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides, a US based educational and certifying agency. In her guided experience, Clifford foraged edible plants from the landscape that he and participants steeped in hot water they’d carried in with them. Their tea was a literal and temporal taste of place.

I noted a number of edible plants in the margins of the trail as we walked together. I picked a paddle of miner’s lettuce from the forest floor. A suspicious drop sat suspended in perfect sphericality at the leaf’s tip. In a park frequented by a lot of dogs I didn’t brave the mystery droplet. I often forage, but I’ve never grazed. I loved this idea of dropping a few things into hot water and tasting them on the spot—once the fir tips have sprouted perhaps, or with the flowers of the salmonberry, which are blooming in tiny fuschia exclamation points all over the forest right now. 

Luckily, Maggie brought a thermos of ginger lemon tea. As we settled onto the bench at the edge of Gazzam Lake, she poured a steaming stream into a pair of Scandi made porcelain teacups she produced from a small pack, carefully wrapped in a red and white printed tea towel. She was not fussy about it, but it was clear that she was fully present to the moment and her movements, that each item had been carefully chosen, that, when she did pour her own cup of tea and bring it to her lips, the entirety of her attention was focused on the sensation of taste in that moment. 

She noted that one gift of a tea ceremony as part of a walking practice was the time it gave one to really be still and fully sensitized in place. “It completes the sensory experiences, really coming home to you in nature, and feeling that presence. Sitting is stationary, so there’s a grounding feeling with that. Especially when I’m sitting on the earth, I just feel more energy pulling on my sits bones, I breathe easier, my diaphragm is more open. I think it just gives me an opportunity to rest, relax, and let go.”

We took a few moments, a few long breaths, we stared out at the reedy margins of Gazzam Lake and the waterfowl and birds that soared and swooped and scooted over and across it. 

Maggie emphasized how privileged we are to live where we do, she and I, close enough to this beautiful, forested reserve to walk here daily if we wish. She restated again her interest in researching the effects of greenspace interventions in urban settings, and how our comfort in this setting is also a privilege. She expressed a desire to see more people exposed to green environments and an increase in psychological ease in forested landscapes and thereby full access to the benefits she experiences from her time in the forest. 

“It brings me into presence. Looking at those mosses, and feeling those mosses, and smelling those mosses, and listening to the birds, it makes me more aware of—put the cell phone down, put the laptop away, be more present to people, be more present to yourself. Be kinder to yourself. Have compassion for yourself.

“We’re intune with nature because we are nature. We’re a part of nature. A dynamic part of it.”

Soley, Maggie’s precious eleven year old labrador, turned her nose into the wind. We admired her calm presence to whatever she sensed on the breeze slipping off the lake. 

“She is pure spirit,” Maggie said, lovingly.

As the three of us stared out at the lake, and Maggie and I sipped tea, I told her that when I’ve been away for a couple days, particularly when I’ve otherwise been habituated to being in the forest daily, I feel a pull back again.

In my first conversation with Maggie in which I shared with her my interest in place attachment the concept didn’t immediately resonate with her. She described herself as a nomad: she’d lived all over California, elsewhere in the US, here on Bainbridge most recently, in France for a while just after she retired, in Switzerland for a time. 

“I’m thinking about moving to Portugal!” Maggie pronounced, “But what about Gazzam!?”

There it is, I thought. I smiled back at her—I get it. Because a forest bath calls for the same ingredients as place attachment: time, depth of attention. That’s not to say either of us are forever bound to living where we do and regularly accessing Gazzam Lake as we are in the habit of doing. But she loves it. She gets it. This place also works on her, she’s also attached.

She poured me another cup of ginger lemon tea. 

“Right now, we could paint a picture in our mind of this lake,” said Maggie, replacing the lid on the thermos. “And we could call upon it when we’re not here.”

I recalled Krista Tippett’s interview with the late John O’Donohue in which he said, “You should always keep something beautiful in your mind…[With] some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.”

“Yes! And I also feel that pull back to these woods when it’s been a few days,” she circled back, “I’ve also been to the Grand Forest—does it do anything for you?”

She referred to another beautiful, forested park on Bainbridge Island. One we are lucky to have. “You know,” I responded, “The trees there are bigger; the forest is actually healthier by a lot of metrics…and it doesn’t do the same thing for me. This is my place here.”

“It doesn’t do the same thing for me, either!” she enthused.

We sat back and sipped our tea, basking in our senses, in our familiarity and enchantment with this place, searching the branch tips for some bit of it to taste on our next visit.