A year ago March I went into the Blue Ridge Mountains with a backpack full of grief and a hope to leave some of it behind with the pines. I was attending a Nature Bathing and Spiritual Formation retreat with Spiritual Directors International, and though I was entering into the trip with sadness, I was also tremendously excited for what I would learn and experience. It was incredible- everything I needed at that time in my life and more. Since that time I have become certified as a forest bathing guide and have incorporated the principals of forest bathing into my spiritual direction practice for those who it speaks and lends resonance to. But the full scale explanation of what nature does is still largely intangible to me. My lived experience informs me that something beyond science is at play. So often I conduct a session sitting outside on Zoom with my directee on the screen across from me and a robin will hop across my yard or the wind will pick up, and something so rich and mysterious places a fingerprint on my soul. Or I will host a forest bathing session and the participants will remove their shoes, letting their toes sink into loom and moss, and we are suddenly teary-eyed with emotion and awe. But awe with what? What large and veiled thing is it that we are experiencing when green and creaturely things steal our collective breath and point us to God? What precisely thins the veil as sunlight glints on a willow leaf, or we witness the colorful barbs of a sea urchin through foamy saltwater?
If I sit in quiet and ask my own soul what is unraveling or being rebuilt in those moments, the first word that comes to mind is authenticity. It is a uniquely human thing to try and be something other than who we are. Creatures can adapt and evolve. And like humans, the instinct for survival can require than animals and trees and flower bulbs do all sorts of things that deviate from the normal flow of a season if the environment requires. But those deviations are coded into the DNA of a thing, and are created adaptations that allow for change but don’t make an animal or a plant something other than what it is. Humans are born with the blessing and the curse of a promise: “You can be anything you want to be!” The fact that humans can’t be anything other than human is inarguable. But we have the potential and the possibility to morph in ways that nature cannot, or perhaps in its wisdom, simply does not. Authenticity tends to become the thing we lose in our early years, hopefully to gain it back in the second half of life. When I walk in the woods I know the season and the time of day based on what the flora and fauna are displaying. I can count on when the forsythia will bloom in March, and when and where I will see Trillium blossoming. I can plan my son’s birthday based on the tulips, and know when the sugar maple has reached November based on the particular hue of the leaves. That kind of dependability is primordial. It reminds us that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and that we share cells with both oceans and galaxies. What a miracle it is that the eyeballs of reindeer turn blue in the winter to help them see light at lower levels. How absolutely beautiful it is that I know what time to expect the juvenile squirrel at my feeder in the morning, and can tell time based on when I hear the spotted towhee’s outside my kitchen window in the evening. Recently I was with my family in Maui, and a woman in the market stall serving shaved ice asked if we would like a local tip to see the sea turtles come to nest for the evening. We trekked dutifully down to the secluded beach she directed us towards, and took note that the fishermen were leaving and the few loungers were packing up to head home for the evening. We worried that with everyone leaving just when we were told to arrive that we might have gotten the location wrong. But we waited. And just as she said they would, moments after the sun dipped, green sea turtles patiently rode the tide into the beach and made their way onto the sand. I wondered for how many decades that same turtle family had been coming to sleep at that same place. How ancient was that ritual? All I knew in that moment was that I was the recipient of an inexplicable tug towards God’s love and mystery.
Within nature’s authentic existence is an offering. We too are invited to just be within the sanctuary of the non-human world. When I entered North Carolina’s Blue Mountains for the retreat, I felt permission to grieve honestly. I hiked and walked and sat and laid prostrate and allowed my body to be in every position while I processed my emotions. I saw God everywhere- in the knots of the white pine bark, in the ripples on the lake water, and in the wild rhododendron that had just started to bloom. There was a chapel on the grounds of the retreat center, but as a group we opted to gather each evening in the outdoor chapel, carved right into a hillside next to a creek and a pine grove. And though the acoustics of the chapel were lovely, I sang louder and with more zeal with the other retreatants when we were all gathered together on that creek’s edge with the sun setting at our backs.
We live in an age where the noise is loud, and the distractions are bleak. Information overload doesn’t just threaten to rob our peace, but our capacity to be still enough to experience moments of mystery. And with election season looming, the screams for our fear and for our vote will only get stronger. If the exact reason can’t be known why my blood pressure lowers and my breathing starts to match the exhale of the trees when I enter into a quiet space in nature, then let it remain a mystery. The truest things in my life always hold an element of the ethereal. Let us wonder and let it be so, and simply thank God for the example of how to live with authenticity and trust that nature so benevolently gives to us.