This quote from an article I read several years ago has stayed with me: “You can be healed without being cured, and you can be cured without being healed.” From that perspective I want to talk about the healing power of nature. There are some wonderful articles you can find from Googling “healing power of nature.” While I don’t take everything on the internet as factual, there are many wonderful resources there.
Last week I wrote about the grumpy student who hated winter and chose to take a walk outside every day for 21 days for her exploration and that she was still doing this 18 months later. She had discovered the healing qualities of simply being outside. Angeles Arrien wrote about this in her wonderful book The Four-Fold Way.
Here I will focus on two powerful experiences I have had recently.
Close encounter with a chipmunk
A couple weeks ago I was meditating while walking on a short walking path at the nearby Temple Forest Monastery. I paused at the end of the path before turning around and noticed a chipmunk on a rock just 2 feet below me.
He looked up at me and we made eye contact. (Note: I flipped a coin and “he” won over “she”. I just can’t refer to the chipmunk as “it”). Neither of us moved for a couple minutes. I have been lucky to have had eye-to-eye contact many times with wild animals including chipmunks, deer, herons, and a full-grown hawk. Those of you who have had such experiences know the incredible sense of awe, connection, peace, and gratitude that comes from such contact.
Suddenly he jumped up to my level and then immediately jumped down, but didn’t flee. He soon wandered off into the undergrowth next to an old rock wall. Resurfacing a few minutes later, he jumped onto a sapling so small that his body swayed almost to the ground. He pulled off a nut on a branch, scampered back to the top of the brush pile, and I watched him eat the nut. I was close I watched as he ate several more nuts. After his meal, he wandered off, and I resumed my walking with a noticeably quieter mind and a soft feeling of joy and peacefulness.
When I returned the next day, he came along the side the path and was completely still for some time, partly I think because we could hear two chipmunks chirping about 50 or so feet away. At some point, he started making chirping sounds himself and continued for some time. He was less than 10 feet away so I could see his throat and his tail moving with each chirp. I started to get tired, so I slowly moved from vertical to seated. He stopped twice and froze but didn’t flee. Once again we had eye to eye contact for periods of time. Then he wandered off. Over the next half hour, his wanderings through the forest completed the perimeter of my walking path. Hm! Coincidence?
I simply know that the sense of communion (“the sharing or exchanging of intimate feelings, especially when the exchange is on a spiritual level”) with the chipmunk had a noticeable impact on my mind and heart at the monastery. Even now, two weeks later, I feel a sense of healing from that time in the forest.
Paraphrasing many authors, I would say that healing involves a restoration of wholeness to one’s spirit. I am also reminded of the title of a wonderful Parker Palmer book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, where he talks about the almost inevitable fragmentation of our selves that modern life can create and our “yearning to live undivided lives.” My times in nature bring some of that sense of wholeness and undividedness back into my heart, body, and mind.
Healing power of the forest
Several weeks after the 2016 election, I was feeling pretty depressed. I called a good friend with whom I take several long walks a year in Pisgah State Park. He couldn’t get out that day but said I could come to his house and walk in the nearby forest. When I got to his house, he said that we needed to go see mother, a massive, ancient white pine in the middle of the forest. We walked into the forest and I immediately started to feel the craziness of American politics and the world recede a bit. We sat on the ground, with our backs leaning against mother for over an hour. We talked about various things and we also had periods of silence. Then we had to go and walked slowly back to his house. On the ride home, I realized that I felt a stillness, a restored feeling of wholeness in my heart.
If you are considering my invitation in last week’s blog to bring mindfulness to something every day for 21 days, I recommend a walk outside every day. Even if you live in a city, many residential streets have trees, shrubs, and flowers (and chipmunks and squirrels!) and many have parks.
I also recommend the following books:
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder