Celebrating emergence

Welcome, welcome, I’m so very glad you’re here! Thank you for sharing a bit of your precious time, your precious life with me. Thank you for letting me share some about the hopes and dreams and aspirations of this new practice!

A red capped mushroom with a white stem pushes up through brown leaves. There are are some small green leaved plants nearby.

Weaving, tending, braiding

These are the words that bubble up as I dream into what could be. I see people all over the world and right here close by tending to each other - using hands and hearts to bring beings together. I call in and call on the work of the often femme and gender expansive people who offer their love and care through tending to hair, food, clothes, plants.

I think of branches reaching out, webs intertwining, the echoes of a shape, a pattern, found at small and large scales - repeating. I think of children playing together, how their imaginations blend, overlap, draw them forward and deeper in.

A blue and white dyed cloth covers a large tree stump. A thermos, tea cups, snacks, a chime, and tarot cards are set on the cloth, and forest decorations including small conifer branches and lichen.

So what does all this have to do with Forest Bathing (aka Forest Therapy)?

For me, this impulse to be with each other in body and spirit is the root of the practice. The forest is a multi-being-ness - just as our whole world is made of our interwoven and never separate selves. Taking a bit of time to be with the world around us allows us to remember our wovenness, our enmeshment - and reweaving where needed. It’s a time to let go a little, find joy, hold our grief, maybe even play in and with the forest.

For so many of us, this is a fearful time, a heartbreaking time. Depending on our identities and experiences, we face real, existential threats. Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other People of the Global Majority face violence daily, as do LGBTQ2S+ and disabled people, and other marginalized communities. We face disasters daily, and we know more are on the way. There is a real reckoning being forced upon us, that we must confront and be with. 

Knowing these realities, can we remember that it’s only through relationship that we move forward? Remember that it’s only through entwining our roots and sharing nourishment of all kinds - by creating an aboveground mycelial web - that we have any chance?

So many communities, so many families know this, teach it, have held fast to this wisdom even through genocide and apocalypse. Whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism have actively sought to destroy the knowledge that our only hope is each other, but this knowing - it’s too strong, it can’t be destroyed. When we are grounded in this wisdom, and nurture ourselves and those around us - then, I believe we have a chance. For me, a little time set aside for intimacy with ourselves, and with the world around us, is one way to support this reconnection, this rooting in. 

A child's light brown hands are cupped together, holding grey lichen. Their body can be out of focus behind their hands.

Creating space for moments of connection and joy is the antidote to despair. They allow us to keep moving, to keep showing up, to keep paying attention. Caring for ourselves in this way not only supports our own bodies, hearts, and spirits but allows us to keep caring for the bodies, hearts, and spirits that we are in community with.

And so, I offer Rose and Cedar Forest Therapy.
This offering is made with love, joy, and in gratitude.

In Forest Therapy, we spend a little time with ourselves, and with the other-than-human beings that surround us. We take some time to settle the thinking mind, and pay attention using our senses and bodies. We move slowly, and drop into the living world around us (rather than the insistent little computer in our hand). We build or rebuild relationships with our deeper selves, and with the trees, and the dirt, and the birds around us. 

I hope you’ll join me in the forest sometime soon to experience this rootedness. Let’s continue to weave, tend, and braid together!

An adult and a child are seen from behind, walking uphill in the forest. Both are using walking sticks. Many ferns, bare branches, and some green conifers surround them.