In search of the gold
The gifts of forest bathing in community and feeling-with autumn's bounty.
My thoughts are yellowed like turning leaves of a maple tree. My body is already preparing to practice forest therapy indoors, welcoming the early darkness of night like being tucked into bed by someone I love. To remember the healing powers of nature inside the home, I drink oolong tea from the Wuyi mountains and I light some hinoki incense, watching the swirls of smoke rise above my tired body. They disperse my anxieties. The days I work, from morning (or mourning) until evening, etiolate my body and soul.
I have never felt the desire to contemplate and harvest the bounty of the past year as much as I do this autumn. I crave the hopefulness of a persimmon’s orange. I feel a resonance with the patience required to luxuriate in its ripest flesh, with its stem crispy and skin tawny like four-day-old bruises. We always expect fruit to be ripe for us, on our human-centric timeline. Our unruly human consumption. But, there is something uniquely beautiful about being in the quiet presence of fruit for a time and then surprised by their ripeness.
Autumn reminds me of what it means to tend to a relationship with the sublime.
The summer and beginning of autumn were full of buzz and intensity for me. Summer felt like gazing upon the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. This year, I have been blessed with community, creativity, deepening nature connection, and healing old wounds from childhood. I have also felt the shared pain and grief of the world’s catastrophes and inequality. Deeply.
I have many reasons to be grateful. I feel overjoyed and proud of the space that we are crafting since launching Roots of Belonging earlier this spring. Since launch, we have hosted several nature-based gatherings for those who self-identify as mixed, dual heritage or multicultural people of colour in the UK.
In July, I facilitated an online gathering on soil and how we might reframe our relationship with soil, and facilitated a forest therapy and picnic at Woodberry Wetlands nature reserve in London, in partnership with the Lond Wildlife Trust. We were surrounded by cormorants drying their wings, electric blue dragonflies, elderflowers in bloom, with salvia hot lips and pineapple weed dotted at the edges of our walks.
In September, we hosted our first Book Walk in Epping Forest on Jessica J. Lee’s newest book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging; tracing our own stories of belonging and unbelonging as migrants and people of colour in the UK, and how we might find a more capacious sense of home and belonging in the more-than-human world. Finally, in October, I had the pleasure of facilitating a forest bathing/shinrin yoku session for a group of us in Greenwich Park, southeast London. We were welcomed by bright blue skies and stately trees in their autumn glory. We created and shared our own nature perfumes crafted from collected gifts from the forest and howled like wolves. We made friends with a crow.
Subconsciously, from spring to autumn, I have been collecting talismans from our community gatherings in nature: a pair of sweet hazelnuts kissing with curling brown seed pods surrounding them like a villain’s crown; an acorn that is still green at the tip; and elderflower seed pods like tiny grapes.
Since qualifying as a forest therapy practitioner this spring, the practice has offered me endless gifts. In tending my relationship to the seasons, I nurture a more forgiving and tender relationship with myself. Forest bathing offers practices that enable a feeling-in or feeling-with the seasons (such as in the German word Einfühlung to mean “empathy”). This sensitivity—the capacity to notice—forms the foundation of the practice. As part of the training, you are required to complete a solo day in nature whereby you spend an extended period of time alone outdoors to facilitate a quietening in your body and mind, and connectedness to the more-than-human world.
Faced with another cycle of my chronic burnout, for my solo day in nature I decided to stay closer to home, rather than in some more remote or wilder place. Going remote felt beyond my emotional limitations. After a few hours, small details felt incredibly rich and intense. I saw an earthworm wriggle up toward the sun, emerge out of the soil and move with intention across the grass in a way I’d never seen before. The worm’s skin looked iridescent and I felt the beauty of this being more than ever before. Their skin was pearl-like. The sun created a rainbow on their skin like light reflecting on an oil slick.
This autumn, it feels as if the seed of my belonging has cracked open. My hypersensitivity is the source of my belonging in nature and my unbelonging in exclusively human or human-made spaces. Forest therapy, for me, helps to heal the perceived nature-culture divide that has privileged human ways of doing and being.
In our world built for othering, I believe home-building must be a collective, imaginative act rooted in nature. Nature-allied forest therapy provides an accessible and meaningful way for people to replant themselves in the universe that reveals their essential ecological belonging and interconnectedness with other-than-human beings.
This autumn, I invite you to practice some small ways of deepening your nature connection. This might be drinking freshly foraged tea that connects you to what is in season and alive at this time. Drinking tea is an accessible way to feel sensitive to the seasons. It might be practicing the ritual of leaf hunting (known as momijigari in Japan — maple leaf hunting, seeking out golden and fiery hues). You might go moon-watching with friends and chosen family. You might go on a ‘colour walk’ in nature, where you let yourself be led by a colour.
This autumn, I am in search of the gold of gingko leaves.
my golden ‘to-do’ list for autumn:
delay everything
drink sea-buckthorn tea
make puzzles and never finish them
cook arroz caldo for friends who warm my heart
collect gingko leaves for my younger self
What I’m reading and listening to:
The album An empty bliss beyond this World by The Caretaker.
If I were Erol - a poetry pamphlet by Kaan K. (published by fourteen).
Chasing Fog: Finding enchantment in a cloud by Laura Pashby.
Tiny Desk concert with The Marías.
What a beautiful and eclectic collection of words, thoughts, paintings, recollections. I am so pleased your events with Roots of Belonging have been successful this summer. Your descriptions of fruit in autumn are stunning and I will never look at our unripe quince fruit in the same way!