I always find that nature, but more specifically trees, help me to feel like the better version of myself. In that sense, nature heals. However, in our current times of social distancing nature also protects and keeps us and others safer. There are tangible and intangible benefits to nature. The physical and the spiritual. I was thinking of this as I strapped on my snowshoes (yes, Spring has not yet arrived in Northern Wisconsin), and set out into the woods for some social distancing, observation, and exercise.
The day before had been warm, but it had been a cold night, getting down into the teens. So as I set out shortly after sunrise, the snow was crusty and firm. Not like the hollow, sublimated snow of just a few days earlier. My snowshoes floated well on top of the crust and may pace was quick. The morning sun was bringing the temperature up quickly, but the morning air is crisp in my lungs.
For ages, nature was full of threat and physicality was needed to scratch out an existence from the wilderness. This physicality evolved and rather than to just be survived, nature was something to be tamed, to be conquered, and shaped to carve a farm, a village, a town from the forest. So there has always been a physicality in man’s relationship with nature. While modernity has removed much of the risk of being in nature, our DNA, shared with those ancestors only a few generations removed from now, responds to it, awakening connections between our minds and muscles.
But nature’s capacity to present opportunities for physical challenge continues. In modernity, we must create the reasons for our physical exertion, but the challenges that await abound for those who choose to seek them. These challenges could come in the form of hiking for a few hours, as I am this morning, or by paddling miles over multiple days through wilderness waterways.
As I’m walking, I listen to the birds waking up. I’m surrounded by the trees. I think about the birds and the trees, they proceed with their lives without concern. While the human world around them is thrown into disarray, it is business as usual for them. The trees continue to grow, taking in the sun’s energy and are now waking up with the warm weather. The oldest of the trees around me are a little over a hundred years old, the successional generation that came after the Wisconsin cut-over. They’ve existed long before me and will continue after me.
The stream is waking up and starting to flow. Some parts have melted the snow above and are open. I break through the ice as I try to cross, but only enough to turn the snow dark with water. The stream isn’t deep anyways. I continue on.
Like the forest waking up from the winter around me, being in the forest connects with and awakens those slumbering strands of ancestral DNA. This is backed by others, popularized in the Japanese concept of Shinrin-Yoku or “forest bathing.” Such therapeutic activity, which can be more specifically defined as engaging in sessions of at least 40 minutes of walking through a forested area, is associated with reduced stress, improved immune function, and enhanced creativity. The reduced stress exhibits itself in measurements of lowered levels of cortisol, lower resting heart rates, and lower blood pressure. Stress hormones are known to suppress immune functioning. Further experiments showed that subjects performed better on creative problem-solving tests after backpacking trips than prior to the trip. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5580555/
It is time for me to turn for home. I see random signs that I am not alone in the woods. I see red, gray, and black squirrels. Yes, black squirrels, these are a melanistic variant of the common gray squirrel that are more common in some regions, including my own, than in other regions. While I hear birds, I don’t see many. Even though it is now mid-morning, I hear a barred owl in a tree close by. This surprises me, as I don’t recall seeing one in these woods before, nor during the day. In the remaining snow I see tracks of all kinds. While I am still learning my track identification, I believe that I saw those of deer, squirrels, martin, otter, porcupine, coyote, bobcat, and wolf. I am not alone, rather I am the passer by, the transient, sharing the woods for a brief time with these and other inhabitants. Who’s claim is greater? I’m not sure that it is mine, I’m not sure that it matters, certainly not to the chickadee.
The snow has warmed now, it is becoming dense and wet. The crust is soft and I break through more often. Some places I still sink beyond my knee. There is still time before spring will come to the Northwoods, but it is coming. As I approach home, I think of the chaos back in modernity, how the modernity is both the cause and the cure of the pandemic that we now face. In that sense, the woods is no longer the threat, but the refuge. It has strengthened by body and replenished by soul, at least for a few hours in the morning.
