“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”

~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

On a walk last week, as I strolled with my dog through the neighborhood, I noticed a single tree with a few red leaves. Not just starting to turn — deep scarlet, saturated, the kind of red that looks lit from inside. Every tree around it was still fully green, thick late-summer canopies hanging low, so the effect was less like autumn arriving and more like one lit window in a block where every other house still had its lights off.

I stopped walking. That’s not something I do for most trees on this route — I’ve walked past this same stretch a hundred times without breaking stride. But that bright pop of red against all the surrounding green made the tree’s message come across even louder: the weather will be turning soon. The air that evening was still warm, still summer-thick, crickets going strong, nothing about the temperature suggesting anything was different. Only the tree seemed to know. Whenever I notice something seemingly out of place, like those crimson leaves, it shakes me from my stupor — a reminder that trees sense the world differently than we do.

While we may be less attentive to the diminutive amounts of light that we have been slowly losing each day since June 21^st, the trees around us aren’t quite as clueless. Light is their medium and they are highly sensitive to the amounts they receive each day, otherwise known as a photoperiod. The tree senses this shift with chemicals called phytochromes. When darkness begins to take up more time in each photoperiod, the phytochromes begin to shift vital functions towards winter withdrawal. Chlorophyll production ceases, and the yellows begin to show through as the greens recede. Temperature tunes the intensity — bright, cool days deepen the reds — but night length sets the timing, trees reabsorbing nutrients from each leaf before they fall to the ground.

In a week or so, this change of the guard will already be about a month along. The change began in the dark – more darkness and less light, temperature changes (or lack thereof here in MN) not as much. That shift was felt deep down in the chemical structures of that tree, prompting those couple of leaves put on their colorful coats. What we humans typically deem ‘fall or autumn’ is just the moment all those invisible changes finally reach the surface for us to see.

Another set of changes has been trundling along right next to the trees for the past few weeks. School is underway. Schedules are colliding. Fall sports are introducing new routines. The tree’s calendar and ours split apart right here. The same week the maple outside my front window starts withdrawing its resources to sustain its winter repose, the school building is filling at 7:30am with joyful, energized kids who only recently met, greeting each other for the day and opening outward, embarking into a new year of commitments and community.

Summer encourages all beings — human and more-than-human — to take advantage of long days and warm temperatures. Packing in as much as we can — work and play, photosynthesis and respiration — while the season holds. Fall, technically, should begin to shift our behavioral patterns towards rest and recuperation. However, with school those behaviors tack in the opposite direction. Marcus Aurelius said the universe is change, and our life is what our thoughts make of it — and I choose to find this pairing genuinely romantic: nature closing up shop, kids flinging their books open, the work of the mind beginning only after the work of the body is done.

Nothing requires these activities to move together, and this week they don’t. The changes we notice are farther downstream than the changes we don’t. We call out the beginning of fall from the first red leaf; but the season began in August, in the dark, on a clock we can’t feel. Transition is underway long before it is visible — in the leaf, in the classroom, in every quiet withdrawal and every opening no one's tracking yet.

Closing question: The tree is already withdrawing for a season it hasn’t reached yet. Which direction are you moving this week — storing, or opening outward?

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

~ Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace, 1952

It’s 11:15 pm. My back door is still open as I sit in my recliner. I can clearly hear the crickets’ and katydids’ overlapping songs. This music draws me out into the darkness of my back porch. I sit down in a chair, being careful not to move suddenly and turn on the motion-sensing light that will erase the light of moon as it waxes towards fullness. As I sit still, I find I’m a bit restless. I can’t seem to get comfortable in the deck chair. I reflexively pat my pockets for my phone – oh, that’s right, I left it inside – on purpose. Letting that thought go momentarily, my brain finds another distraction – the darkness.

Nighttime in the city can be a time for nefarious behavior. Ring camera videos of random strangers checking to see if house doors in my neighborhood are locked abound. This underlying fear is a remnant of something older and deeper – a return to the original fight or flight responses that emerged in our evolutionary relatives. Darkness is when nocturnal predators prowl, and when our ancestors got eaten. So, through reflex and evolution they learned to be wary of the darkness. As I sit here, I realize I’m relatively safe in my fenced city back yard. No large predator will suddenly jump out of my hydrangeas to drag me off as dinner. But shouldn’t I send that text response to my buddy about golf… . No. Not now. Tomorrow.

The biophony of the day has gone quiet and the night shift is in full swing. The male crickets and katydids that drew me outside originally are now surrounding me with nearly 270 degrees of sound as they seek mates, establish territory, and drive off rivals. It is actually incredibly loud for a time of night we typically deem hushed and quiet. That’s because their main predators are asleep, the environment is generally quieter than during the day, and sound travels farther in the cooler, denser air of the evening. The crickets can also actually tell us how cool it is, if we focus intently on their songs. A cricket’s chirp-rate tracks the temperature so reliably that you can count the number of chirps in fourteen seconds, add forty, and read the night in Fahrenheit — an American physicist named Dolbear worked out the formula in 1897.

Sporadically I hear the squeaking chatter of bats hunting above my head. They amaze me. Imagine being nearly blind and using sound to find a microscopic meal zipping around in the darkness. Despite this seeming handicap, they are eerily accurate – they can sense objects as small as a mosquito and as thin as a human hair in complete darkness, pinpointing the location of the insect snacks down to the millimeter.

While not completely “dark” (yards in the city rarely are, due to sky glow) outside, I find that my eyes can certainly make out much less detail about my surroundings, so I emulate my bat friends and close them, refocusing my attention to my ears and what they are hearing.

One thing is immediately clear. There is no birdsong. The birds, save for a stray indistinct call overhead, are asleep. The insect melodies are quite different than their avian counterparts. The steadiness of their stridulation creates a distinct rhythm that differs considerably from the melodious trills and twitters of the birds. As my ears reach out to gather all the surrounding sounds, I find my breathing slows as well. It is as if I can visualize myself in the center of a blank page and I start to place the sounds I hear at different places on the page.

That group of crickets is singing from behind me to the right, the high whine of a motorcycle accelerating on the highway beyond, momentarily obliterating the cricket’s song, is in front of me to the northeast. The geophony of the wind blowing through my neighbor’s maple tree tickles my senses above and to the left. I feel like I’ve been invited into one of those listening rooms in a hi-fi stereo store where the sound is so crystal clear and the experience is so profoundly physical that you just shiver in awe.

With my listening practice working its magic, I find my body and brain are finally slowing down. At that moment I ponder how delightful it might be to just recline in this chair and sleep out here in my ‘porch room’ amidst this hypnotizing music of the night. I’d have the moon as my night light, and I notice that my few minutes on the deck have begun to feel less like an endurance test and more like sliding between a comfortable set of sheets.

In letting go of fear and fidgeting fingers, I reclaimed my attention. And that was the whole of it. Not the phone, not the golf text, not my pillow waiting inside — this: just me in a chair in the dark, giving the night the whole of my attention. Weil called that prayer. For a few minutes on a deck under the waxing moon, I understood what she meant.

Closing question: When did you last sit outside in the dark with nothing in your hands? If it’s been a while, what would it take to try it for twenty minutes under this week’s moon?

No sign-up required for the version in this essay. Tonight, if the sky is clear: a chair, the dark, nothing in your hands. That’s the whole practice. But if you’d ever like to do it with a guide, you’ll find me here.

“Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. … Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.”
~ Mary Oliver, “How I Go to the Woods,” Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, 2010

One of my favorite things to do is to scout new locations for forest walks. Along with absorbing the beauty of new locales, one of the things I enjoy the most is the solitude. At the time of day I choose to wander the new trails, there usually isn’t anyone else around. This is intentional. I am able to feel the uniqueness of that particular woodland as it wraps itself around me. As psithurism — that dry, sibilant hush of wind through the leaves — moves across the treetops I still myself and listen. Sitting on a downed log, still damp from last night’s rain, I open my ears to the concert of birdsong above, and the staccato pattern of acorns dropping into the duff of the forest floor below.

I observe the way the trees extend their roots out and down, like hands reaching into a life that exists only below ground. My eyes catch the drifting sunflecks filtering through the canopy, bringing a brief spotlight to many different beings moment by moment. I love witnessing the incredible strength of a delicate maidenhair fern, pressing up through layers of decomposing leaves to practice some photosynthesis. And the smells…the ‘forest musk’ of ongoing senescence and fragrant bedstraw’s warm coumarin-vanilla smell of drying hay that rises on the air this time of year. I particularly love the way I feel nearly invisible sitting still in the midst of all this. Forests that are the best choices for walks are the ones most indifferent to me.

The forest’s complete lack of regard for my presence is a powerful gift and one I want to be sure I share with those I take with me in the future. While humans may think they exist apart from nature, they are simply another part of it. Nothing reinforces this more than sitting still in the center of the rich biophony of a glorious autumn forest. Everything is going about its business, ignorant and uncaring about my presence. Where else in modern life can we experience this anonymity? Here in the woods exists a privacy that life in the human realm can never offer. Our day-to-day social lives are ones of continuous observation – others watching us, us watching ourselves, our feeds and emails monitoring our every action via algorithms. A landscape that does not attend to you offers you the experience of existing without being seen. That is not solitude as deprivation. It is solitude as relief.

As I sit there on that log, absorbing the woods’ vitality, I feel so calm and peaceful, as if I never want to get up and return to ‘real life’. It makes me realize that we have made stopping feel akin to the original sin. In much of the developed world being unreachable is now protected by right. Those who work hard are mandated weeks of leave to find respite; they are even provided a legal right to ignore the after-hours message. While here, rest is something we steal rather than something we’re granted. We’ve built a land where “I’m slammed” is a boast. Unfortunately, the cost runs deeper than tiredness.

When researchers left people alone in an empty room with nothing but their own thoughts for fifteen minutes, a startling number chose to give themselves painful electric shocks rather than sit in the quiet — shocks they had, moments earlier, said they would pay money to avoid. Offered stillness or pain, they reached for the pain, because silence does not soothe; it surfaces. It hands back everything the noise was holding down. The empty room is silence as absence: nothing to attend to with no relief and no exit. That’s like the January silence we discussed last week, the void.

But the forest is different. The forest is silence as saturation. The shock study proves that empty, stimulus-free silence is genuinely unbearable to most people. That’s precisely why the forest matters. It offers the stillness without the void. It’s silence you can disappear (and thrive in) because it isn’t empty. That’s why Mary Oliver prefers to wander it alone. The forest doesn’t work because no one’s watching. It works because while you’re not actually alone in it, nothing is focused on you – not even you. Amongst the soft breezes and dappled light, the birdsong and squirrel antics, you can be unfinished, unbothered, and uncurated. This is not a ‘service’ the forest offers you; it just happens to be a natural byproduct of its indifference.

This is why the second, or even third, hour in the woods can feel both like rest and exposure, and why it is worth staying for. To be unproductive and unobserved are the same quiet defiance — and the forest is one of the last places you can still practice it.

Closing question: Where’s the place you go when you don’t want to be seen — not hiding, just unobserved?

“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening… You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.”

— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

I’m relaxing on my back deck as the day begins to close around me. As I’m soaking in the sights and scents of my garden, I hear it – that ubiquitous buzz-saw drone that can only mean August in Minnesota. Neotibicen canicularis is in full effect. The Dog-Day Cicada is offering up its full-throated call to find a mate; and doing so in the only way it knows how – with a sound of around 100 decibels, easily able to drown out table conversation. What I find intriguing is that while we must wait until the call ceases to continue our chat, the male cicada creases or tucks his own eardrums while he sings so he isn’t deafened by his own call.

I’ve always loved cicadas. Despite their songs reaching those ear-piercing levels, I’ve always been awed by them – their Jurassic Park-like style, their textures, the fact that they live underground, their cool molted skins that I find all over at this time of year. I love their iridescent green wings. I even love the way it feels to hold one and have it crawl slowly across my hand. Sure, they can make conversations a bit harder when a lot of them are going strong, but those songs can be a reminder to you of the day’s warmth you are enjoying a few last times before the seasons begin to shift. Did you know cicadas are mini weather stations? They only sing when it is warm/hot out. They are silent when it’s cool. The temperature is encoded in the sound, if you know how to hear it.

Cicadas weren’t the only sounds I was listening to, of course. Crickets were beginning their evening symphony, somewhere a nighthawk screeched and a dog barked, chimney swifts twittered high above as they snacked on mosquitoes, and my neighborhood squirrels were warning each other about an undefined threat with those guttural squawks that always surprise me. This was the biophony of my backyard — Bernie Krause’s term for the collective voice of a habitat’s living things — each creature on its own rung, none overlapping.

There are also deeper sounds, more ancient ones we can hear every day – geophony. I heard these too that evening – wind blowing through the trees, the bubbling of my neighbor’s small backyard fountain, the creaking of elm on the side of my house. Krause developed this idea in partnership with Stuart Gage. It encompasses the earth-made, non-biological sounds that were present at the beginning of time – wind, waves, thunder, rain, and the creaking of ice. These sounds also grab a rung on that same ladder.

Here is the strange part: despite all these sounds surrounding me, the late afternoon felt quiet. When I put some effort in, I can hear each distinct sound, each with its own ‘channel’. But if I just sit still and relax my effort, the air surrounding me is so saturated with sound that my brain gives up trying to parse all the distinctions and just perceives a quiet summer yard in late afternoon. This fullness is a unique kind of quiet; an early morning in January – that is another. Sounds of life are rare. The world has been reduced to the howl of winter winds, even the snow falls without a sound. This is the true silence of absence.

Unsurprisingly, there were still more sounds to be heard. My backyard garden is in the city. I could discern car tires moving through the alley, far off sirens racing towards an emergency, jets taking off from MSP, a lawnmower and a leaf blower, a neighbor hammering… This is the last piece of the puzzle – anthropophony – sounds made specifically by human beings. Krause divides anthropophony into two segments: controlled sound that carries a message — language, music, theater; and incoherent, chaotic sound, mostly electromechanical, which carries none and can be actively harmful. It is the second type of sound I was experiencing from my deck.

Let’s go back to the ladder visual for a moment. Imagine the low rungs are low sounds; high rungs are high sounds. Every sound in the world fits somewhere on this ladder – this is called the frequency spectrum. What’s so awe-inducing to me is that even when all these sounds are pouring forth from my backyard – the crickets, the cicadas, the birds, the squirrels, the wind in the trees – they don’t muddy together. I can hear each sound if I want to. Because each sound has its own rung, they don’t cover each other up — you can hear all of them at once, like a choir where everybody’s holding a different note. That stacking is the biophony of the locale, and each creature’s or element’s rung is its “niche.”

The issue with our chaotic human sounds is that they attack a large swath of the frequency spectrum all at once. Those lawnmowers, garbage trucks, or car alarms don’t just sit on one rung of the ladder. They smear across a lot of rungs. The crickets and birds are still singing. I just couldn’t hear them anymore when the sirens blared nearby, because that loud chaotic noise is standing where their voices go. So anthropophony doesn’t merely add sound; it also erases biophony by occupying its niches. This disproportion, this unevenness, is what makes human noise so destructive. The landscape doesn’t fall silent because the animals leave all at once. It goes quiet because the room their voices need gets overtaken.

When the sirens finally passed, the yard reasserted itself — not louder, just uncovered, every rung filled again. And that is the thing this deck keeps teaching me: to hear all of it as biophony, rather than as background, asks only that I give the place my whole attention.

That is what Dillard meant, a few lines on from where we began: “Nature’s silence is its one remark.”

Closing question

Can you name the one constant sound in your own place that you had to listen for tonight to hear again — the sound you had stopped hearing because it never stops?

Verified sources

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982). Epigraph and closing line drawn from the title essay — “…this hum is the silence” and “Nature’s silence is its one remark.”

Bernie Krause — soundscape ecology / ecoacoustics. Introduced the term biophony, the collective voice of a habitat’s living organisms (the term is sometimes attributed to his colleague Ruth Happel, with Krause developing the concept); geophony and anthropophony developed with Stuart Gage; the two-part division of anthropophony into controlled sound (language, music) and chaotic, largely electromechanical sound. See The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (2012) and Wild Soundscapes (2002).

This August 31-Sept. 2, I’m leading a three-day forest bathing retreat at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in Finland, Minnesota — and I’d like you to consider coming.

It’s called In the Company of Trees: The Silence that Speaks.

Over three days, we’ll move slowly through Wolf Ridge’s forests together. Guided walks at dawn and dusk. A fire circle at night. A twilight wander under the waning moon. Bark rubbings, sit spots, tea ceremonies, and long stretches of quiet. Woven throughout: the Stoic invitation to meet the world as it is — not to escape life, but to see it more clearly.

If you’ve been reading The Forest Philosopher for a while, you already know the ideas. This retreat is what it feels like to live them, for three days, in good company, with old trees all around.

Space is capped at 30 participants. August 31 is closer than it feels.

Register for the Wolf Ridge Retreat

If you have questions, just reply to this. I read every one.

Gratefully,
David Motzenbecker
The Forest Philosopher

There were eight of us gazing up at the full moon amidst the trees, open fields, and lakes in Lake Elmo Park Reserve northeast of Saint Paul, MN on Wednesday night. The light of moon began quite subtly – but as it began to rise higher in the night sky, we could sense how the forest around was lightening up. We could suddenly pick out details of leaves we couldn’t discern mere moments ago.

The one thing that was particularly insistent we notice it – the moon itself. A moon that, thanks to Artemis II’s April voyage, we now have seen in exquisite detail. Its custard-hued light offered us a chance to play in the moon shadows – which are always fun to experience – and also moments just to be still, silent, and bask in the lunar glow, pondering circles, cycles, and life itself.

But there were also things we didn’t see. The Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower for one – the lights from our numerous habitats and highways, the full moon itself blazing away, and the location of the meteors in the lower northern latitudes make it difficult to view these phenomenon in MSP’s urban realm. Basic stars and constellations were also quite hard to see due to the city glow and the moon’s presence. Their fire was shrouded. And we certainly, especially with such a large nightlight, didn’t see the Empyrean.

A favorite word of mine - Empyrean. It derives from Medieval Latin – empyreus, which in turn is adapted from the Ancient Greek empyros – meaning in or on the fire.

The Empyrean was believed by the ancients to be the highest of all heavens, a place where the element of fire resides. The early Christians believed it to be the dwelling place of God and the angels – beings so divine they are composed of pure light – the source of all light. This word came to be used by humans looking up at the night sky and describing the highest arc, the farthest reach of stars they could see. I like the word because it feels a bit mystical in nature. It evokes something ancient and awe-inspiring power, something beyond our comprehension.

Two obstacles stood between me and the Empyrean — the moon, natural and cyclical, sharing the sky on its own schedule; and sky glow, which shares nothing and only accumulates. But even the faint, obstructed view evoked something Francis Thompson said over a century before in his poem “The Mistress of Vision” (1897):

“Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.”

Nothing in a forest, in a body, in a box of Wheaties, is separate from what’s happening in a galaxy. Everything on Earth is entangled with the stars above it — our very bodies contain star stuff. An hour earlier, under that same moon, we had done nothing but revere it — playing in its shadows, going quiet in its light, calling it beautiful without qualification. But reverence and domination apparently live inside our species without much friction: why do we carry such an inbred urge to dominate the globe, to bend everything on this amazing world to our will? And why stop there — why not Mars, or the very Moon we’d just finished admiring?

Carson named the root of this back in 1962, to a graduating class, in words that could sit inside any of our essays this month:

“Between the time of those early voyages into unknown seas and the present we can trace an enormous and fateful change. It is good that fear and superstition have largely been replaced by knowledge, but we would be on safer ground today if the knowledge had been accompanied by humility instead of arrogance. In the western world our thinking has for many centuries been dominated by the Jewish-Christian concept of man’s relation to nature, in which man is regarded as the master of all the earth’s inhabitants.”

This is the same notion that Aldo Leopold told us about thirteen years earlier, in different words — the same posture this whole series has been arguing against. Carson then reached for the great John Muir to skewer it further:

“A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.... Whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways.”

Muir’s acidic joke actually aged into something much less funny: we did eventually light our own way - well enough to drown the actual stars out entirely.

Carson had the deep-seated courage to call out her own generation’s failings — and it’s worth knowing what this admonition cost her. She gave this address four days before the first installment of Silent Spring would appear in print, already bracing for the campaign of harassment and legal threats from the chemical industry that would follow. She was also, though she said nothing of it publicly, already dying of the cancer that would take her less than two years later. She had spent what strength remained to make a cross-country flight, just to stand in front of this graduating class. She could have used the moment to defend herself, or to comfort the graduates with the typical commencement platitudes. Instead she intoned:

“I wish I could stand before you and say that my own generation had brought strength and meaning to man’s relation to nature, that we had looked upon the majesty and beauty and terror of the earth we inhabit and learned wisdom and humility. Alas, this cannot be said, for it is we who have brought into being a fateful and destructive power.”

Sixty-four years later and that wisdom and humility are still missing in action. We’ve just decided to crowd out the Empyrean, the way a glaring and unnecessary light crowds out a fainter necessary one — and we knew enough, even in 1962, to name the crowding as arrogance rather than accident.

But Carson didn’t end there. She continues:

“But the stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny.”

“Mastery — not of nature, but of itself” is what we’ve been circling this whole month. The patris doesn’t need conquering, or even a dramatic, torch-bearing defense. It needs us to master our own appetite for light, for more stuff, for just plain more — these same appetites are the ones that lit the strip mall that drowned out the Milky Way in the last billionth of a second. Figuring out our relationship to the patris was never just an act of allegiance. It’s the unglamorous discipline of restraint, practiced imperfectly, and mostly alone — trying, for once, to notice something beyond ourselves. I hope my daughter’s generation will be the one to achieve the impossible.

Somewhere near Lake Elmo Park Reserve tonight, a porch light is almost certainly burning over an empty driveway, lighting nothing, for no one, until morning. Multiply that single bulb by every driveway and parking lot and gas station canopy left blazing out of habit rather than need, and the sum of all that unneeded light is exactly what stood between our small group and the Empyrean this week. Carson ended her address with a borrowed proverb: “In today already walks tomorrow.” I interpret that as “we get what we give.” If we are so focused on taking, our exponential depletion of this planet will certainly come back to bite us — because we won’t have mastered ourselves and our appetites. It’s ultimately about balance.

We are certainly stirring more than flowers here in 2026. I couldn’t see the Milky Way from that dark patch of grass at Lake Elmo, but I could still feel its absence. I hope we learn before it’s too late.

Closing question. Carson called the mastery of ourselves “our hope and our destiny.” What is the one appetite — for light, for more, for growth — you could master on behalf of something you’ll never get full credit for protecting?

This is the last stop on July’s series, though I hope it isn’t the last time you look up. If you want company doing it — actual dark sky, actual patience, no phone, no strip mall — the fall retreat has a night built around exactly this. Register today.

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all… Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

— Eugène Ionesco, Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir (1968).

While going through my training to become a Certified Forest Therapy Guide in 2018, we were based in Northern California at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. One of the last elements of our training involved taking a ‘medicine walk’ to deepen our experience of all we had learned that week, and of the forest itself.

Heading out into the park for three hours, (instead of the typical three days of a true medicine walk) without breakfast to stimulate my focus, I found myself wandering down Rattlesnake Creek. To be clear, throughout the trip I had been on edge about the rattlesnakes that made this park their home, not wanting to inadvertently scare one. So, for this last bit of wisdom acquisition, I consciously made the choice to venture down the reptile’s namesake creek to address my fears.

After about thirty minutes of picking my way across boulders and rocks in and around the creek, I found the perfect spot to sit - a boulder had been deposited at some point in the center of the watercourse, right before a small drop. Water flowed around each side and then played its music as it fell. The stone molded to my body perfectly, nary an uncomfortable bump to be found. As I sat there, I fell into a state of being I can only describe as slightly hypnotized. The beauty of the forest and watercourse surrounded me; birdsong and other natural sounds moved through the air...and I sat still and just absorbed it.

When I finally checked the time, I realized an hour had passed in the blink of an eye. In my reverie, I was suddenly compelled to write. And write. And write. The words flowed from my pen in an unmitigated stream. In the end, as my writing drew to a close, I was presented with a gift. In my mind, I suddenly heard the words - “You Are Ancient”. This became the title of the poem I had just scribbled out. I distinctly remember not wanting to leave the forest that day. I had to physically fight against the pull of the woods and the creek and force myself back to camp for the appointed rendezvous with my cohort. I had built an incredibly powerful connection just by being still and paying deep attention to my surroundings, letting them in.

Looking back on what I wrote that day, I see that I tapped into a bit of what we’ve been discussing this month – “Eons mineralized, crystal latticework, molten mothers of yore… Atom by atom, micron by micron…seeding the forest in a slow-motion starburst of creation from which we too have emerged.”

I realize now that I was observing the ancient light of the universe plus ancient stellar matter – both are embedded deeply in all things on this planet – including us. It was also clear that over billions of years all those elements of life are still there, within everything we can see, feel, hear, smell, taste. Even in that rattlesnake I never saw. Mountain became soil became root became leaf. Fusion becomes photon becomes sugar becomes wood becomes you. Different material, same patience. So, in the end, you are light too. The question is, why have we forgotten this?

We are not visitors nor conquerors of the patris – though we sometimes feel we are – we are made of it. We are citizens assembled from the light of the stars, crafted in the same patience as the oaks and stones have been. If this is the case, we should owe our allegiance to this ancient place of metamorphosis. Uphold it as the thing that gave us life, and protect and defend it at any cost.

Instead, we slowly and exponentially strangle all life from it. “Over a third of humanity, and almost 80% of North Americans, can no longer see the Milky Way” (Yong, An Immense World, 2022, drawing on Falchi et al., Science Advances, 2016). Sönke Johnsen, a Duke biologist who has spent his career studying how animals perceive light, was quoted in Yong’s book above as writing: “The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end.”

This conscious ignorance of our origins, of how light continues to sustain us to this day recalls Ionesco’s epigraph. The memory of how important this primordial process is has unfortunately receded into the pale depths of DNA, beyond where we can seemingly access it, or even be aware of its existence. This is an odd spot to be in, because we truly need nature to survive. Nature doesn’t need us. It can take us or leave us, just like any other species that has existed or been extinguished since life emerged. Unfortunately, our species doesn’t quite grasp the severity of things until the 11^th hour. This happens more often than not. It’s happening now.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) an Austrian, born in Vienna to a wealthy, cultured Jewish family, became one of the most famous and widely translated writers in the world during the 1920s and ‘30s. During the Second World War, Zweig was invited to make an address to the American PEN Club. The PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) Club was formed post-WWI in 1922 in NYC with the goal of fostering friendship and cooperation among writers across national lines, believing that if writers could learn to reach across borders, nations might eventually follow.

Humanity didn’t get the message. Amidst WWII, Zweig’s address was filled with a sadness, almost a resignation that our species seems incapable of moving to this broader state of existence. Zweig wrote this for that address in the last year before he took his own life, in exile, watching the Europe he loved be destroyed: ”Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads” (“In This Dark Hour,” 1941; trans. Will Stone, 2016).

As we find our species careening towards another catastrophe of unfortunate human actions, I am curious what it will take to see the majesty of those stars, of the light that is a part of us all? Or will we slowly disintegrate – like the stone worn away over eons by the water in my creek.

Closing question: When did you last see the Milky Way? What does it mean that the oldest light of all has been lost to our own?

This closes out July's series — though the questions it raises don't end with it. If you want to keep sitting with them, there are two ways in: guided walks this month, built for exactly this kind of stillness, or this fall's retreat, a full weekend with both the forest and the sky.

Here are our upcoming walk dates.

If you’d rather head up north here’s the retreat sign-up.

We burrow into the forest, hiding from the broad light of day, our poetic, wild mind waiting and biding its time… The word ‘emergence’ comes from the Latin emergere, ‘bring to light.’ Everything begins in darkness.

— Mary Reynolds Thompson, Reclaiming the Wild Soul (2014).

For almost two weeks now, the MSP metro has lived with temperatures in the 90’s and heat indexes that have tipped into the 100’s. In other words, it’s damn hot. However, under the trees this past weekend, my cohort of forest walkers and I felt comfortable. A slight breeze wafted over our skin, as the ancient maples and oaks above us kept the sunlight at bay.

Sitting still and gazing out over the undulating topography and tree branches, one tiny spot of sunlight snuck through – and I’m not kidding – it found a Cardinal sitting on a branch in my viewshed and the red just popped. I think it was the fact that we were in so much shade, paired with the way the bird’s beauty was highlighted by the sunbeam that wowed me. I just stared at that red blaze until the bird flew off and the shade returned.

The gravity of the difference this deep shade made hit home for us as we finished up the experience and started walking back to our cars – in the sun. Everyone remarked on how palpable the shift in temperature was from within the woods to without. It was like emerging into a sauna.

As we discussed last week, the forest is light made solid. What falls to the forest floor is the leftover of that competition, not a portion set aside. In a ‘Big Woods’ environment like we were walking in, nearly none of that light makes it to the ground – which is why the temperature difference was so distinct. But the trees and understory plants are still growing, albeit slowly. They do this by having evolved to take advantage of those lovely little bursts of light that my Cardinal was sitting in – sunflecks.

Sunflecks are described as small, brief, moving patches of sunlight that break through the canopy. They accomplish this via gaps in the leaves, the angle that the sun’s arc places the light at as it moves through the sky, or wind shifting branches in different directions. All those understory plants evolved to take advantage of the mere seconds or minutes of light they receive from the myriad sunflecks each day. Like our opening quote intones, they are biding their time and waiting to emerge – bringing the light to bear on their very existence.

This slow, steady building up of interconnected communities is how the patris formed, and continues to do so – where and when we don’t interfere. Some of these benefits look like shelter. Some look like defense. In 2015, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s team found that a distressed Douglas fir releases chemical signals through its shared fungal network that trigger defensive responses in the neighboring pines. Some of the broader claims built on this research – that forests function as deliberately cooperative, mutually caring communities – are still contested among ecologists. But the underlying finding holds: something in the ground is already - quietly - defending.

Patriotism has always implied a debt: the patris shelters you, and in return you defend it. The forest has already held up its end — it has been shading, feeding, and sheltering us for longer than the word “patriot” has existed. Edward Abbey put the harder version of this debt plainly: “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” Ordinary patriotism asks you to defend the homeland against an outside enemy. This demands something closer to the bone: the chief threat to this particular homeland is not a foreign army. It is us.

The decisions of our own government, the behavior of our own economy, our own hand on the saw. What does defending the patris even mean, when the thing it needs defending from is humanity?

Here is what makes our debt to the patris urgent rather than sentimental: shelter and abundance are not two separate gifts from two separate systems. They come from the same place. Cut down the trees to build with and those trees are not the only thing that disappears. The shelter and shade they provided are also gone. The interconnected ecosystem that grew up around them is now in shambles and must scramble to regroup or perish too. To take from it carelessly is to take both at once.

What will it take for us to learn this lesson? As one of my favorite writers, Maria Popova, lyrically muses in one of her latest Marginalian newsletters (2026):

“In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still enough and quiet enough to hear the story of our becoming, the song of life evolution encoded in our cells.”

If we consciously and exponentially continue to decimate the very thing that shelters us, gives us pause and protection, helps us to breathe – that defends us from ourselves – our Hubris deserves its Nemesis. We deserve to lose all of it.

Closing question: A patriot defends the homeland. What have you ever actually defended on behalf of the woods that shelter you?

This particular Saturday had a small cohort of forest walkers sharing the woods with me — there's room for a few more on the next one. If a couple hours of real shade sounds better than another day in this heat, come find out what else is illuminated by the sunflecks.

Today I wandered out to scout a potential site for future forest walks. It was accessed down a long, dusty, and curvy dirt road. As the road moved up and down, and side to side with the topography, so did my body. I let it flow with the land as I drove. Supremely enjoyable.

As I settled into the small dirt lot and emerged from the A/C, the shadeless heat bowled me over. Luckily the humidity wasn’t high enough to make it miserable. I took a look at the small trail map and headed off towards the trees. Strolling along the canopy closed slightly overhead, giving some relief from the sun. Suddenly the path split. I decided to go left as that would take me towards the lake, which I had wanted to see. I’d retrace my steps and take the other path shortly.

My feet moved off along the chosen path. Black-eyed Susans were blooming everywhere – both in the path and along the sides. The path curved ahead of me and then started to drop towards the lake. At that moment, I beheld it. Oberon – King of the Forest. The oak that filled the view in front of me was simply massive! The weight of just one of its branches was likely multiple tons. I was in awe.

I stopped cold. Wow! What a tree – how old is it? I realized at that moment that almost all the trees I had been passing on my way in appeared quite old – some oaks, some maples – all ancient. But this oak – it was magnificent. It is hard to describe the feeling looking up at the branch above me that was defying gravity, and the picture above certainly doesn’t do it justice. The branch was larger in circumference than I am, and it was stretching horizontally for 40 feet or more. That’s a serious engineering cantilever. The oak couldn’t look less fazed.

At the gym yesterday we did an exercise where we had to hold a weight out horizontally and turn it like we were driving a car – without letting our arms drop. Talk about deceivingly intense! My arms were burning – and I was only holding ten pounds and got a break every 35 seconds. Imagine if what I was holding was 4,000 pounds and I could never rest? Now you’re beginning to see why I was in awe.

Over the years, that oak took all the 8-minute old sunlight it could hold in through its leaves and transformed it into wood. The overwhelming mass of the tree literally comes not from the soil but from the air, carbon pulled out of CO₂ and assembled using light. A tree is, almost literally, light and air made solid. Long, long ago those trees built our breathable atmosphere – pushing it to its all-time high of about 35% oxygen (it is currently only about three-fifths of that long ago richness, hovering around 21%). The forests created the conditions needed for us all to inhale and exhale 20,000 times each day, every one of those breaths is drawing in air those forests spent 300 million years assembling. The same forests we now burn with impudence and short-sightedness.

Are we really patriots if this is our accepted pattern of behavior? Remember a patriot – per ancient Greek etymology – is one whose allegiance and love is first and foremost for the land. Since the forests created the very thing that keeps us alive, the wood that provides us shelter, and the animals and plants that provide food and medicines, shouldn’t they have the largest claim on our allegiances? Apparently not. We power the nation by burning this ancient fatherland.

This same reverence for wooded, templed hills invoked in My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, is echoed again in the iconic redwood forests of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land — temples if there ever were. If we can cast these lauded elders aside so carelessly, are we not hypocrites? Aldo Leopold alluded to this same question back in 1949 in his essay The Land Ethic, wondering why we sing such praises to the land in all our patriotic songs and then actively destroy it.

These songs are, today, overwhelmingly occasional ceremonial music sung standing, in groups, at moments the country marks itself. While we only see fit to formally sing our devotion to the land on these fixed calendar days, the actual forest is doing its unceremonious work of catching light every single day. This is a deep, eons-long enduring strength that cannot continue to be ignored. As Jarod K. Anderson writes in Something in the Woods Loves You (2024):

Those delicate, senescent leaves that we so enjoy as they let go each fall – they hold a unique power of transformation. They can catch light effortlessly and slow it down enough to make it green and build these amazingly massive feats of natural engineering — a process happening right now in an estimated three trillion trees across the planet. The weight of light we spoke of last week is now literally something you can lay your hands on.

I still feel that gym exercise every time I think about Oberon. Ten pounds for thirty-five seconds burned my arms with fatigue. That oak has been holding four thousand for centuries without a single rest. If a comparison like that changes how you see the next tree you pass, imagine what an afternoon standing under a dozen more like it could do. I’d be glad to take you.

Closing question: Your lungs exist because forests built the air. What allegiance do you owe the thing that made it possible for you to breathe?

Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.

— John Burroughs, Birds and Poets (1877)

The temperature on Monday was oppressively hot. The sunlight was bold and strong in a nearly cloudless sky, making its power over us unignorable. The thickness of the air bearing down on me and my fellow Minnesotans was palpable. Carrying a humid weight that could be felt on each pore of my skin and on every inhalation. As I walked through the grocery store parking lot to my car, embedded in our first truly ‘summer’ air of the year, it felt as if I was parting consecutive velvet curtains of fire and water. Summer has a weight that winter does not.

This invisible medium we were all wading through travels so fast it only took 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel to our skin from its source 93 million miles away. Officially, with all scientific factors considered, that afternoon’s fusion-infused air felt nearly 110 degrees. Something else to consider – the light we all felt the weight of on Monday was ancient – more than half as old as our species. Let that sink in for a minute. While those photons of light took less than ten minutes to get to us, they took almost 170,000 years to get from their point of creation in the core of the sun to the surface, where they could finally escape into space and head our way.

This week we cross a major milestone as a country. Tomorrow, on July 4th, the United States will celebrate our 250th anniversary. The red, white, and blue colors will be flying everywhere, and patriotism will be on full display. Light will also make a cameo in the festivities via nighttime fireworks. In the same 250 years our nation has existed, those photons in the sun had likely only moved about 3.8% of their way out of the core — roughly 16,600 miles, or about two-thirds of the way around the Earth. A photon exactly our country’s age is just slightly less than 170,000 years from ever reaching daylight, let alone your skin.

Our word patriot is derived from ancient Greek patriōtēs (fellow countryman) from patrios (of one’s fathers) from patris (fatherland), with patēr, father, at the root. The interesting wrinkle is that the Greeks used the word patriōtēs for people who shared only a common patris — a land. This is quite different than a politai, citizens who shared a polis, a political state. Discovering that one of the oldest meanings this word held was one of belonging to a land and not allegiance to a government was eye-opening.

We pledge allegiance to a flag two and a half centuries old, standing on a continent whose forests are 1,300 times older than our species. The light pressing on you left its source before humans existed; the patris it forms here on Earth predates every border ever drawn. The oldest place — the one that precedes us, forms us, and sustains us — is not the country drawn on a map three centuries ago. It is nature. Katharine Lee Bates saw this vision of ‘purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain’ and put pen to paper forming one of our most enduring paeans to this country in America the Beautiful.

Samuel Francis Smith in crafting his contrafactum called out the wonder of ‘rocks and rills, woods and templed hills’ in yet another ode entitled My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. As Margot Elsbeth Fassler states in Music in the Medieval West – “Examples of contrafacta abound in many times and cultures. My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, for instance, is a contrafactum of an earlier English anthem, God Save the King, and the reworking makes a statement about American democracy.” An astute pairing of refutation and adoration.

Smith’s third verse pushes the adoration further, asking that the song “ring from all the trees” and that the very rocks “break their silence” to carry it. The land of North America struck a deep chord with our forebears. The very life that light created here was at the root of their songs of praise. The weight of light is the weight of an allegiance older than any flag.

Liberty Enlightening the World is a figure many of you know, standing in New York harbor holding a torch aloft since 1886. Her crown represents sunlight projecting outwards, illuminating the world. Carrying light is heroic effort — a raised arm, a burden borne – especially when, as Burroughs intones, as soon as you try to hold it, the light is gone. Many of you know how difficult it can be to start a campfire in the wilderness – trying to get that spark to hold takes effort and concentration.

Think of all the heavy lifting our electrical grids do day in and day out to bring light to our lives in its myriad forms. We only notice it when it’s gone. Darkness asks nothing of anyone. Every hard-won belief, every act of courage we’ve carried into the world took someone willing to hold the spark and tend it against the wind. As Liberty offers all who pass a visual reminder that carrying the light is no easy task for us humans, the patris quietly turns sunlight into the world.

The forest has a special talent – it has held light for 385 million years without lifting anything: it does not hold the flame up, it catches it, and turns it into wood and air and you. The work of photosynthesis is as awe-inspiring as it is effortless. In milliseconds a plant captures photons of light and in a few additional seconds, sometimes minutes, creates energy for itself via chemical processes.

This land is our pater — father — and across deep time it fathered the very air we breathe. The Carboniferous forests, 300 million years before us, buried so much carbon that atmospheric oxygen climbed to the highest level in Earth’s history. The coal and oil we now burn are those buried forests. To strike a match is to release light their bodies have held for three hundred million years.

We often discount the power of light. We take it for granted that the sun will rise each day and fuel our lives here on Earth. The transparency of light often leads us to use it as a synonym for nothing – weightless and without substance. However, as we all noticed on Monday the power of the light was anything but lacking in substance. And if we look to all that light has brought to life and sustained here on our planet, the weight of light’s work becomes even more profound.

Closing Invitation: Name the oldest living thing within a walk of your home. We pledge allegiance to a flag — why nothing to that?

My desk location was being shuffled, yet again. In the past five years I’d sat in about seven different locations in the office. Most of the time we were shoehorned in, since there really wasn’t enough space; the office was growing, after all. No disrespect intended, this other team needed the room and besides, your team doesn’t need that much room. No view to be had except for the parade of my co-workers’ tan cubes, stretching to infinity. Eight to ten hours each day – surrounded by plastic, manufactured wood veneer, metal, and carpet.

Commuting each morning down concrete highways and into a concrete parking garage. Step into a metal elevator and descend to a concrete tunnel leading into a concrete and brick building. In the afternoon, the reverse. I felt more numb with each passing day. I sat in endless meetings for multiple projects, sucking up most of my time and leaving few working hours to actually devote to said projects. Something was off.

Angry and frustrated was my resting state. My fuse was short. While generally tactful, my mettle was tested on a continuous basis. This was not me. What had happened to that joyful and happy guy, filled with light and kindness? Stress was certainly having an effect on me. But this felt deeper, different. This utter disconnect from the very spaces that feed human beings – the spaces that it was literally my job to create – was ruining me. Something at the root of my being was missing. At the time, I blamed the job. The commute, the meetings, the fluorescent lights. But the diagnosis was deeper than any of those. The problem wasn’t where I worked. It was where I didn’t.

Our lineage evolved in nature for millions of years. We’ve been Homo sapiens for 300,000 of them. We spent roughly 290,000 of those 300,000 years in daily, unmediated contact with the more-than-human world. Agriculture separated us from the wilderness about 10,000 years ago, still, farmers lived outdoors among their animals, and their work was continually governed by weather and seasons. The industrial era of our existence is only 250 years old. The fully sealed, climate-controlled indoor life that most people today live — the one our bodies are rebelling against — is younger than your grandparents.

Let me put it differently: 97% of our existence as a species was spent in the environment your nervous system was designed for. Every day your body completes 22,000 exchanges of breath with the living world — the same CO2/O2 partnership that has been running for 2.4 billion years. Your lungs don’t know they’re in an office. They’re still holding up their end of a relationship your calendar has no room for.

The indoor world we embrace so vehemently is only a rounding error on the timeline of human experience. We are demanding our bodies treat it as normal. This is not normal. We are consciously depriving ourselves of the very thing we desperately need to make ourselves whole. This is deprivation at the species level. One of my favorite authors, Robin Wall Kimmerer, chooses to call this not species deprivation, but rather species loneliness.

The loneliness epidemic across the planet is of tidal wave proportions and still growing. Research from the World Health Organization (WHO) states that – globally – 871,000 deaths are linked to loneliness each year. In 2023, the US Surgeon General felt the issue was bad enough to declare loneliness a national epidemic and put out a health advisory warning the American people of his concerns.

The loneliness so many people on this planet are experiencing is not a social connection issue at all. It stems from our lack of deep ecological connections. This is what Kimmerer is hoping to get across. We evolved amongst immense, interconnected ecosystems overflowing with living beings of all types. We watched them and learned. We worked with them in reciprocity. Now we believe, and live in a way, which says “our species is the only one that matters.” Without this ecological connection, we will always be incomplete. Not metaphorically. Not inspirationally. Developmentally and neurologically.

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, professors at the University of Michigan, saw this in their research. They discovered that our attention is actively restored and re-aligned by four distinct qualities of restorative environments they termed: being away, soft fascination, extent, and compatibility.[i] In 2009, Kuo and Faber Taylor published a study in the Journal of Attention Disorders showcasing that a 20-minute walk in a park produced attention improvements comparable to common ADHD medications.[ii]

Another powerful mind-body connector are nature’s fractals – in branches, bark, lightning, the flickering flames of fire, waves and river pathways; but also, deep inside of us: our circulatory and nervous systems, our lung structures. They all look the same. There is something inscrutable embedded deep within our DNA that calls out to these fractal shapes – desiring a relationship. However, ignoring that relationship is something we’ve been doing for an exceedingly long time.

This sense of human superiority isn’t a recent phenomenon. Since the European colonization of this continent our Western belief systems and hierarchies have allowed us to enact our own exile and estrangement from that which once nurtured us, because we believe ourselves to be the pinnacle of creation. In a different worldview, that of the Ojibwe - one of the peoples indigenous to this land of Minnesota, humans were the least of creation. According to Ojibwe author Edward Benton-Banai writing in The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (1988, University of Minnesota Press) – in the Anishinaabe creation story “man, as the last of Kitchi Manitou’s creation, regarded plants, animals, and all of creation as elders because those life forms were created first.”

In other words, we were created to learn from everything else on this planet – not to dominate it. This belief existed long before traditional Western documentation – being passed down orally through generations and sometimes written on birchbark scrolls. The Ojibwe, whose homeland includes every forest I’ve written about this month, understood something Western culture forgot — that we are the youngest, the last to arrive; and that every maple tree, every deer, every mycorrhizal network is an elder with something to teach us.

That deer in Nisswa — the one that perceived me through its 297 million olfactory receptors while I stood with my eyes closed — was an elder. It was reading the forest through an umwelt I will never enter, using an intelligence far older than anything I learned in school. And my first instinct was to feel awe. Not superiority. Awe. The 385 million years of forest intelligence I talked about in the last essay isn’t just a scientific fact. It’s confirmation of what the Ojibwe have always known – humans are but a minor player in the story that is creation.

To ease this epidemic of loneliness and disconnection we need to embrace the role of the students we should be. We need to begin with learning to see the world differently, not as a commodity or resource, but as a partner. We do this through what Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall calls Etuaptmumk — two-eyed seeing. He believes we cannot achieve this connection with Western scientific observation alone, nor mystical communion alone. We need to do both simultaneously — using the strengths of both Indigenous and Western scientific worldviews at once.

This is what I’ve been doing for the past eight years as I hone this practice. Using my landscape architecture eye and my Shinrin Yoku eye are two different ways of seeing the same forest. One view is trained in Western design, the other in Japanese embodied sensory practice. Using them simultaneously is how I am able to see and connect to the layers of the forest that are typically invisible to us. This specific way of noticing is how I am consciously rebuilding my capacities for attention, humility, care, awe, and patience.

Another critical piece of this framework that Kimmerer offers is that “the encounter is not ours to initiate. It is already underway.” The phytoncides are already entering our lungs. The elder maples at Wolsfeld Woods are already passing intelligence to their saplings through fungal threads thinner than a hair. The forest at Spring Lake is already producing the oxygen that enters your blood with every breath. None of this waits for your permission or your attention. The forest is already holding up its end of the relationship. The question is not whether nature is necessary. The question is how long do you intend to leave the conversation unanswered.

Civilization gives us language, law, art, cooperation — but not the capacities that precede and undergird all of those. The ancients understood this. They had specific words — spiritus, pneuma, ruach — for breath, for life force, for the animating principle connecting our souls to the world. They knew that what moves through your lungs also moves through the trees. We built our civilization and promptly forgot what every ancient culture remembered. The deep attention that predates literacy. The humility that predates religion. The care that predates ethics. These are older than culture. They come only from an encounter with what is not us.

Closing Invitation: Before you go outside this week, pause at the threshold — the doorframe, the building exit, the edge of the parking lot — and notice what changes in your body the moment the more-than-human world begins. Not what you think about it. What your body does. Shoulders dropping. Breathing shifting. Eyes softening. That involuntary response is not relaxation. It is recognition. Your nervous system remembers the environment it was built for. Now ask: How many hours this week did I spend entirely inside human-made space? Count honestly. The number is the argument this essay has been making.

[i] Kaplan (1995):
Kaplan, Stephen. “The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 3, September 1995, pp. 169–182. DOI: 10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

[ii] Faber Taylor & Kuo (2009):
Faber Taylor, Andrea and Kuo, Frances E. “Children With Attention Deficits Concentrate Better After Walk in the Park.” Journal of Attention Disorders, Vol. 12, No. 5, 2009, pp. 402–409. DOI: 10.1177/1087054708323000

“What IS this place?!,” I remember thinking the moment I stepped through the mirror and into the Wonderland that is Wolsfeld Woods for the first time. The awe of my first glimpse at the rolling topography, towering maples, creek, and ravines was breathtaking. I immediately felt hushed, like this wasn’t a place for speaking; rather, it was a place for feeling, for sensing, for paying attention to a different level of intelligence.

Having traversed its trails so many times, I have some favorite memories of the power of expression these woods possess. October 27, 2021, was one of those days. As I moved down the trail from the parking lot into the woods proper, I enjoyed the anticipation built by the compression and release that this short entry trail enacts on me every time I visit. Taller shrubs and shorter trees are planted closely together on each side of the trail, arching up overhead and creating an immediate dimming of the daylight as I set foot within the space. Walking about forty feet is all it takes – the canopy of the entry tunnel lifts up and away as the forest expands magnificently in all directions.

No matter how many times I visit, I always pause briefly at this spot, this moment, to let my eyes take in the glory of this amazing old-growth example of one of the State’s original biomes – the Big Woods. This remnant was once part of an enormous swath of more than two million acres that ran from the southeast corner of Minnesota, diagonally, up into the center of the State. This biome once functioned as the transition between the prairies and the northern boreal forest. Looking out on this forest, I feel like I am time traveling 200 years into the past.

This particular October day was simply glorious. The hue of the very air was rich and golden as the sun shone down through the solid yellow canopy of Sugar Maple leaves that had all turned for the fall. It was also warm – in the mid-50’s that day. I walked and walked and walked. I snapped pictures. I sat still and absorbed the stunning beauty that surrounded me. I inhaled the sweet and earthy fragrances of microscopic isoprenes and terpenes drifting down from above. These unique phytoncides are compounds trees release into the air to warn other trees about insects that may be attacking them, or to attract the predators of those same attackers. When we inhale them, they have been found to boost our immune systems, reduce stress, calm inflammation, and enhance antioxidants. All this just from being still and enjoying a fall day in the forest. It was clear to me this place is special – it contains something utterly unique. Recognizing that something comes from over twenty years of practicing landscape architecture – it has a deep and abiding genius loci.

Genius loci is defined as the spirit or intelligence of a specific place. My landscape architecture training honed this discipline of reading what a place wants to be. Now my vocation is helping others to hear it. In retrospect, I now understand that these are two professions tuned for accessing the same thing: the intelligence and power of the forest.

A place accumulates intelligence over centuries — soil chemistry, what species inhabit it, the way water patterns shape it. This place, and so many others across Minnesota or wherever you might be reading this, knows something. What I hope you understand is that learning to hear it is a real skill, not a mystical gesture. The Wolsfelds, gratefully, were able to read this intelligence early on.

Settling these 220 or so acres in the middle of the 1850’s, the Wolsfeld family discovered that all the hills and ravines made it impractical for farming. However, the abundance of maple trees was beneficial for making maple syrup. This venture began in the 1880’s, and lasted until the 1940’s. The Wolsfelds had read the land’s genius loci: the hills said don’t plow me, the maples said tap me instead. The family listened, and the forest persisted. Today, we are all the lucky sojourners who get to experience, firsthand, a 170-year plus case study in listening deeply to the land.

However, this is just scratching the surface. There are layers of intelligence stacked within the forest that, given our current propensity to move blindingly quickly through the world, we are certainly missing on a day-to-day basis. Things like the networks of mycorrhizae, those phytoncide signals, phenological timing, and the insightful movement of roots. The forest’s calendar even puts ours to shame. It is so much more precise than ours, as each year it reads temperature and sunlight, knowing just when to send out fresh buds in spring and when to let the leaves turn color and drop in the fall.

Just to be clear, this is not anthropomorphizing the forest. These are measurable, documented biological processes. I am offering up the idea that intelligence does not necessarily require a brain, consciousness does not require a human form, and communication does not require language. The forest solved problems of distributing its resources, responding to threats, and collective coordination millions of years before we arrived. So how do we learn to read these unique examples of its intelligence? How do we learn to see genius loci wherever we are?

It takes stillness.

Remember that breathtaking pause I experienced when the canopy opened up before me, my wonder at the golden light falling around my shoulders? This was the door opening for me, inviting me into another dimension of a world I thought I knew. This parallel world moves at a much statelier pace than ours, but one that is accessible to us if we know how to notice. This is what happens when trained attention meets ancient intelligence. Let me go a bit further; when I lead walks we have an invitation – done on every walk - that asks us to attempt to move at the speed of the forest for a brief while. I have now done this over 400 times and I’m still improving each time. When I personally engage this gear within Wolsfeld Woods, I can feel time downshift as if I’m moving through a gateway into another realm that looks exactly the same, but feels wholly different.

There is one particular place I always pass by, a gathering of mature maple ‘elders’ atop a small plateau that overlooks the creek. These trees are grand. They are massive. They have stories to tell of histories lived across centuries. My body senses something indescribable when I enter their presence. It is as if I have entered a regal court and am being regarded by an old, wise council of woodland gods. These elders host innumerable saplings at their feet; beneath my boots they are sharing stories with them via fungal threads thinner than a human hair – these threads are called mycorrhizae.

Through that network, the old trees are sending sugar, water, and chemical warnings to their offspring. Teaching them how to navigate their roots through the soil and avoid competitors, find water, and allocate it to survive. This is intelligence and problem-solving at the cellular level. Suzanne Simard documented this in her book Finding the Mother Tree — mother trees prioritize their own young. That feeling I have of standing in a regal court watching elders pass down stories? It’s not metaphor. It’s what’s literally happening underground.

This feeling is palpable, and it happens every time. I can sense this because I’ve been practicing noticing things at a slower, deeper level for close to thirty years as both a landscape architect and as a Shinrin Yoku guide. Yet, accessing this intelligence, being granted permission to understand, takes both patience and practice. As with any practice – the more you do it, the better you become, and the more you receive in return. We have spent centuries defining what constitutes intelligence. Spoiler - it looks like humans inventing things, humans solving pressing problems, and humans figuring out how to explore the outer edges of human knowledge.

We are uncomfortable admitting that there are distinctly different forms of highly sophisticated networked intelligence in such close proximity to us. Trees have existed nearly 1,300 times longer than our species. Instead of fearing the intelligence of the forest, I’d prefer we listen to, and work with it.

One of the best ways to begin learning is through an intentional tuning up of your senses. When you have slowed the incessant chatter in your body and your brain, tuning into each sense while you stand under the canopy, the forest will begin to share its story with you. What the forest knows isn’t just interesting but necessary. This knowledge isn’t optional enrichment but something we evolved alongside - and now live without.

Closing Invitation: This week, return to a place you’ve visited before — a park, a trail, a yard, a single tree. Stand there and ask: what does this place know that I don’t? Notice the species composition, the way water moves, what grows where. You are not projecting intelligence onto the landscape. You are reading intelligence that has been accumulating for longer than your city has existed. What is this place telling you?

The rain has just stopped. I’m sitting on a downed log in the middle of a stunning maple wood hidden in the heart of Spring Lake Regional Park. I inhale deeply. The air that moves into my lungs is fresh, thick with moisture, and bursting with oxygen. I imagine myself as that oxygen molecule, speeding through the tunnels of branching fractals within my lungs then dissolving into my blood stream and traversing to the far reaches of my body. I dissolve again sending my particles into individual cells. My gift allows the cells to respire and produce their own fuel. As an oxygen molecule, I am no longer. What remains after this Fantastic Voyage is simply carbon dioxide and water. The process reverses and I exhale the carbon dioxide. This is one breath.

What about the maple woodland I’m sitting in, where does it stand in this equation? My exhaled CO2 dives into microscopic pores on the leaf surface called stomata. Inside the leaf, my molecule absorbs sunlight during photosynthesis, my carbon is stripped away and is combined with water to build a sugar called glucose (the tree’s fuel). The left-over component from this process, oxygen, is released back into the forest through the stomata. That’s what I – or perhaps the deer - inhales next. The air forming the perceptual umwelt of the deer has gone through the same process as mine. We are bound together by breathing the same air. Despite this, we will never grasp how the other truly perceives the world.

This seemingly inconsequential act of breathing happens on average about fifteen times each minute. Throughout the course of 24 hours, this means I am inhaling/exhaling nearly 22,000 times. Let that sink in for a moment. Now imagine the amount of air exchanges in a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. It is hard to comprehend. The loop is continuous and mutual. Every breath I take completes one half of a biochemical exchange that has been running, in various forms, for roughly 2.4 billion years.

Spiritus is the Latin term for breath. It was the ancient world’s distinction between the living and the dead – the observation of something physically moving in and out of the body. The Greeks called this pneuma, also encompassing breath but adding to the definition that it was force that animated all living things. The Stoics believed pneuma was the connective tissue of the entire universe. The universe breathes, and your breathing is simply an individual expression of that universal respiration. Rationally, if everything in the universe shares the same animating substance, then existing separately is just an illusion and interdependence is the basic structure of reality. The Hebrews knew this as ruach, in Sanskrit it is known as prāṇa.

For nearly every ancient culture breath was never just an exchange of gases — it was understood as the meeting point between self and world, between the individual and something larger. Breath was where the boundary between self and world dissolved. This is a deep and ancient partnership, operating at a molecular level with every breath, whether you notice it or not.

What does this reciprocal relationship with the forest demand of us? What would genuine reciprocity look like? You are in a relationship whether you acknowledge it or not, and relationships have terms. The terms are already there, woven quietly into the forest, but our inattention doesn’t allow us to grasp them. If we are a true partner in this relationship between planet and people, we need to hold up our end of the bargain. We need to consciously pause and seek a way to re-embed ourselves within nature.

Are we entering a second Axial Age? The first Axial Age (8th to 3rd centuries BCE) saw philosophies and religious systems emerge independently across the globe — traditions that would guide humanity’s intellectual and spiritual evolution for millennia. We may be standing at a similar threshold. The questions surfacing now about our relationship to the living world are not local or parochial — they are appearing everywhere, across disciplines and cultures, simultaneously. What those questions demand is that we stop treating the very partnership that produces the air millions of species breathe as someone else’s problem to be kicked down the road, and start treating it as what it is: sacred.

As Stuart Kauffman argues in an exploration of a second Axial Age: “A ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.” But what does careful participation actually look like on a Friday afternoon? For me, it looks like dirt under my fingernails.

One of the ways in which I co-create the world is within the walls of my garden. As a landscape architect, one of our core tenets is genius loci. What is a place telling you it wants to be, and are you listening? I had an idea of how I initially wanted my garden to look, what plants would go where and with which others. Now 14 years on, I am following their lead instead. I notice which plants may not be ideally positioned, and I move them to a place more suitable for their needs, not mine. The result is a flourishing, not a fight for life.

The garden taught me that reciprocity doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or policy position — it’s simply the decision to move the hosta to where it wants to be instead of where I planned for it to go. It’s the small, repeated, unglamorous acts of paying attention to what the living world is asking for rather than what I’ve decided it needs.

Step outside and take three deliberate breaths near a tree or a patch of green. On each exhale, register the fact: you are giving this plant something it needs. On each inhale, notice the return. This is not visualization. It is biochemistry. Then ask yourself one question — not about gratitude, but about reciprocity: “What have I given back this week to the living systems that sustain me?” If the answer is nothing, do not feel guilty. Feel the gap. That is where the relationship begins to change.

I stood still, eyes closed and senses tuned, in the middle of a forest in Nisswa on Wednesday morning. Wind blowing through the pines, oaks, and aspen that surrounded me also blew across my skin; birdsong bombarded my ears in 360-degree surround sound; and the scents of pine, warm soil, and geosmin made their way to my nose.

Suddenly, I heard a distinct and deep snuffling sound. Keeping my eyes closed, I turned my head in the direction of the sound trying to grasp the source. It continued. Dead leaves and tussocks of sedge crunched under the steps of something large. As much as I wanted to hold onto my discipline, I peeked. My eyes caught the three phantom white tails of deer flagging as they nearly noiselessly bounded off deeper into the woods.

They were not far away when I saw them disappear – had they been closer to us before I opened my eyes? The snuffling had sounded closer, but then, so does every sound the forest offers up once you close your eyes. One deer had discovered us, gotten startled, and was warning the others about the potential threat with a forceful exhalation of air through its nose.

This was a powerful experience, despite its brevity. My companions and I were not just standing amidst an inert landscape, yet that is how humans tend to treat nature. We see it as scenery, as backdrops to human drama, as a thing to look at; a cultural routine of viewing rather than inhabiting. The Hudson River School is a perfect example of this habit.

The forest is anything but inert. The vitality, movement, and consciousness present within its boughs exists in its own time; it is indifferent to us, but aware of us all the same. The forest is animated, attentive, and responsive. That was just proven by our encounter with the deer. Perception is reciprocal. I was “looking” at those deer, despite having my eyes closed, and they knew it. They were seeing me as well – first with their noses, then their eyes.

At the moment I heard the deer’s snort, I knew something bigger than me was mere yards away. Something with an umwelt I’ll never comprehend was assessing me, determining if I warranted indifference or action. Umwelt is a German biologist’s word for the perceptual world each species inhabits — the particular slice of reality its senses construct.

Jakob von Uexküll coined it a century ago, and it is a concept that shakes my foundations each time I revisit it. The thesis is that there is no single “environment.” There are only umwelten, overlapping but never identical. The deer standing thirty feet from me on Wednesday was not standing in the same forest I was. Its world was built from multi-layered scent trails I couldn’t detect and a 310-degree visual field that registered my slightest movement as a potential threat long before I heard its snort. My world, at that moment, was built from birdsong and pine scent and the warmth of June sun on closed eyelids. We occupied the same coordinates but inhabited different realities.

This is what makes the forest an interlocutor, a participant in conversation with you. A mirror gives you back your own world, passively and instantly. But the deer was not reflecting me. It was perceiving me from inside an experience I will never enter — and responding from that experience with its own intelligence, its own assessment, its own decision. The interaction between us was drawing out what I didn’t know I was carrying. Something deeper began to surface in me.

In that moment, I realized that despite all my training – in landscape architecture, in forest therapy, and eight years and counting of practical experience amidst the trees helping others to notice – I still could not truly notice the deer. I couldn’t communicate with the deer on its wavelength. I had no idea how to make that deer, or a woodpecker, or a squirrel feel at ease around me. Despite feeling so calm and interwoven within the woods, at that moment I still felt a profound disconnect between our worlds.

But perhaps that disconnect is not a failure of my training. Maybe it’s the point. The forest does not offer you understanding of the deer’s world — it offers you the opportunity to recognize that the deer’s world exists, that it is as rich and real as yours, and that you cannot enter it. That recognition is what changes you. Not knowledge, but a powerful encounter with the limits of your knowledge. Encountering umwelten should shake us out of our stupors, awakening us from what we think we know and pulling back the curtain on the innumerable things we don’t, and never will.

This week, go to a place where something other than humans is alive — a park, a trail, a single tree on your block. Sit or stand still for ten minutes. Notice what rises in you that you did not intentionally bring. A feeling, a memory, an unfinished thought. And notice this: the living things around you are perceiving a world you cannot enter. The bird above you hears frequencies you will never register. The tree beside you is reading invisible chemical signals on the air. Let that fact settle into your body, not your mind. The forest did not put what you are feeling there. It gave you the silence to hear it. Not to analyze, but to acknowledge that the conversation has started.

I love the feeling of being awakened by the birds. I heard them early, looking at my clock to see the time was 5:12am. I let my eyelids close until some sunshine joined with the birds in their morning symphony. I love this, the slow languid stretch of letting my body rise as it was meant to, not as a clock dictates. Coffee now in hand, I sit on my back deck amidst the ever-rambunctious explosion of spring greenery that is adding structure and color and texture to my back garden hour by hour.

My garden is lush. The peonies are pushing their buds ever outward. A few are open, but soon they will all burst, chiffon petals offering their layers of fragrance and color to us - and nutritious sugary sap to all the ants that take up residence in the unfolding blooms. The sparrows now have two chicks shouting for food amidst the cacophony of all the other neighborhood birdsong.

I close my eyes and allow the sun to fall on my face. The dewy smells of the morning waft towards my nose — prompting serotonin production, quietly lifting my mood. I take a stroll around the garden, noting what has changed. Which plant has put out shoots or has flowered, how are my vegetables faring, and which birds are serenading me? What does the ground feel like under my feet, and is my mint big enough to pick for an early-season gin rickey? I stay in this urban Eden for two cups, no more. Observing. Noticing. With all of my senses heightened and aware.

This is my morning ritual which I will practice as many days as possible, from now until the frost flies. I do this because it is essential for my wellbeing and my perspective on the world. It gives me quiet, uninterrupted time to ponder the things that need doing, the things that don’t, and the things that feed me. The term the Stoics used for the raw materials that nature places before you each day is aphormai. Aphormai - ah-PHOR-my - literally means starting points or points of departure. It comes from apo (from) and horme (impulse, drive) so etymologically it means that from which an impulse proceeds.

During this practice I am not just being mindful and focused on noticing, nor am I just appreciating things for which I am grateful. I am certainly doing both of these things, but aphormai also asks me to go one step farther, and act. To take all the things showing up just for me each day and build something with them. The season is not a mood. It is a set of materials. Step outside, perceive them, and build your day from what you find.

This extends well beyond the morning. Once you begin receiving the season’s materials, you start noticing them everywhere — in your energy, your appetite, your patience, your ambition. May offers longer light than December and I find myself working later not because I have to, but because the day is still giving. The tomatoes and cucumbers tempt my body as I await their fruition. I reach for fresher foods without deliberation. I write differently in spring — more expansively. In winter I turn inward, I plan, I rest. I used to think that inconsistent behavior was a problem. Now I understand it as a seasonal fluency, a flow rather than a stricture.

This is what life feels like when the internal clock and the external one are no longer at war. This is living inside the right clock. Not empty — full. Not idle — attentive. Not the absence of obligation — the presence of alignment. I choose to let the season speak first each morning before the calendar starts making its demands. I still run a business. The emails still come. The difference is that I no longer begin the day by surrendering to them. I made a choice to give the first hour to the season before giving the rest to the schedule. That choice — small, daily, utterly available — is the one no one can take from you. This is my homecoming. Not a place. Not a date on the calendar. A temporal relationship with the season — one I return to every year, and one that has never failed to receive me.

Name one place in your life where you’ve been fighting the season — pushing forward when it asks for rest, withdrawing when it asks for expansion. Just name it. You don’t have to fix it yet. Naming it is the first step towards coming home.

This past week I observed the striped, lidded walls of Jack in the Pulpits rising from the duff on the forest floor. They were not present the week before. I also observed intense pink clusters of samaras weighing down the branches of a red maple, making it appear breathtakingly like a crabapple tree flush with spring flowers, and as I strode around a bend in the path, my eye caught the quick S-curves of a garter snake escaping into the underbrush away from my steps.

Around this time of year, I begin to notice my body craves lighter foods – salads and other green things, rather than the heavier stews, casseroles, roasts, and soups of winter. Temperatures also drive clothing choices. 50-degree weather in May prompts some to don shorts and tank tops and lower the convertible tops on their cars. In October that same temperature encourages many Minnesotans to start wearing knit hats, scarves, and puffer coats. These are all examples of phenology and what it tells us about our surroundings.

Phenology is the study of cyclic natural events — the first frost, the returning warbler, the opening of the first bloom — and their relationship to climate, place, and season. Keeping a phenological journal is the practice of it. For example, writing down the first time you see a Red-Winged Blackbird each spring achieves many things. For me, it reminds me of my grandfather and his creek-side home and orchard I enjoyed wandering when I was a child. It stirs emotion – my wistfulness at missing him, my joy at hearing a bird call that I genuinely love. It also fosters wonder and curiosity at the timing of the observation. Did the date change substantially? Why? Was the preceding winter harsher or milder, long or short? What has changed in me since my ears heard last year’s first call? This action of recording our observations encourages us to continue to hone our attention to changes in our surrounding environment – and in ourselves. This is something that has occurred since the first vestiges of human civilization.

Almanacs have existed since ancient times. The Chinese system of twenty-four solar terms (jieqi), dividing the year into precise seasonal moments for agricultural use, dates to the Han Dynasty - around 200 BCE. By the 16th and 17th centuries almanacs were outselling the Bible in some parts of Europe. In the United States, the Old Farmer’s Almanac holds the distinction of being the longest-running periodical in American history. It has been published annually since 1792. I have the 2026 edition right next to my living room chair. I dive into it each month to read the weather predictions, and also to compare how the Almanac’s predictions fared for the current month. I love how it names spiritual celebrations and when they occur, the reading of the tides, and the offer of a short poem that encapsulates all the vagaries of what Mother Nature might showcase for us that month. I also looked to see the recommended time to plant my veggie seeds for optimal growth this year.

Why do publications like this remain so enticing across centuries? It is because humans are curious. They always want to know what’s going to happen next week, next month, next fall. It is that same curiosity that prompts us to visit fortune-tellers or mediums. Because we want to know about things, some natural – some supernatural. Ultimately, it is because we seek to embed meaning in our lives. To do that we must locate ourselves in time, know what the year is doing, and what we should be doing within it. A good almanac doesn’t just tell you the date — it tells you where you are within the larger pattern. It helps you grasp that you are in a season where all life around you understands it is time to emerge. It places you within the turning arc of time, not outside it while it passes you by.

My Gregorian calendar tells me it is Mother’s Day, but my body tells me the season is Spring. I sense the shift in moisture in the air – humidity asserting itself. The smell of blooming crabapples and lilacs reinforces that the earth is warming and preparing for growth. Tuning your body into these sensations, observing and marking them — this is your oldest and most reliable almanac.

This is what the oldest almanacs were doing. Not inventing a system — recording what attentive bodies already knew. The Chinese system of twenty-four solar terms was a reference tool focused on phenology. Some of the entries in the document read like this: grain rain, awakening of insects, frost’s descent. Evocative and informational. I read those words and imagine how skilled our ancient ancestors were at paying attention to distinctions of seasonal change in their landscapes. The Japanese - in the Edo Period in Japan, around 1685 - adopted the Chinese system and expanded it even more deeply and poetically, creating references for 72 microseasons, or shichijūni kō.

For instance, this week’s microseason (or ko in Japanese) is number 22, encompassing May 21 through May 25. It’s titled Kaiko okite kuwa o hamu – Silkworms start feasting on mulberry leaves. Other examples from the rest of May and early June include Safflowers bloom, Wheat ripens and is harvested, and praying mantises hatch. The names of each microseason read like field notes from an extraordinarily attentive and focused naturalist. An interesting distinction from an almanac - they don’t describe what the calendar says should be happening — they describe what a careful observer in the landscape might actually notice.

The 72 microseasons are a collection of shared phenological observations across centuries. They are unique in that they train your attention on things that are fleeting or easy to miss. Each microseason, each observation, is an invitation for humanity to notice something more-than-human. To go beyond ourselves momentarily and connect our operating systems to the Earth’s mainframe.

What is so meaningful to me about the power of this practice is its ability to connect us to ancestors and fellow human beings from millennia ago. Imagine a woodworker in 17^th century Japan noticing the evening cicadas singing in August, then think about the fact that soon you will be noticing the exact same thing, now, in 2026. That is a beautiful and powerful continuity. This revelation takes us outside ourselves for a moment and puts us in touch with something bigger, a world we don’t preside over, that we have no control of, but that still includes us and allows us the privilege of listening and living within it as it moves ever-forward.

Start a phenological entry for today. What microseason is occurring in your backyard today? Write it down. Date it. Return to it next May.

Strolling through the woods on a warm, pleasant May afternoon, I suddenly feel a raindrop or two on my skin, then five or ten, their rate of descent expanding exponentially. I hear them slapping their chorus onto the leaves above as the sky opens in earnest. Not a thunderstorm, but rather a nice, soft spring rain. As I continue wandering down the trail in this cloudburst, I notice it. The smell is simply glorious.

You know it too, as have our relatives and ancestors. Interestingly, our proclivity for and sensitivity to this smell is 200,000 times better than a shark sensing blood in the water. A shark can sense 1 part per million when smelling blood; we can sense 5 parts per TRILLION when smelling this powerful perfume. This distinctly special scent we humans are so exquisitely equipped to suss out is a compound called geosmin.

Geosmin is a compound produced by soil-dwelling bacteria called Actinomycetes (ak-tih-noh-my-SEE-teez). This is one component of the two-part aromatic cocktail that is petrichor, the other part is a mixture of various plant oils that accumulate on the dry forest floor. The word petrichor was born in the mid-1960’s and is credited to two Australian mineral chemists working at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation of Australia). It is a combination of two Greek root words – petra and ichor. Petra means stone or rock; and ichor was the mythological and ethereal golden fluid that ran through the veins of the Gods. The blood of gods, held in stone, and released by rain – that’s a pretty powerful metaphor. Something truly primeval that we are physiologically hardwired to sense.

We are able to smell geosmin within the envelope of petrichor because it turns into an aerosol when rain strikes it. The force of light rain hitting the soil is enough to create a microscopic air bubble that aerosolizes the fragrant compounds for us to breathe in. This is why it is easier to smell petrichor in light rain rather than a downpour. A downpour is too intense, basically suffocating the air bubbles that have time to form in a gentler rain. It is believed that humans developed this highly specialized scent detection ability to help with survival. Being able to pick up the scent of geosmin so readily helped us find water and fertile earth for planting and foraging. It also prompts the production of serotonin – our “feel-good” chemical.

Here’s how the process flows: Dry soil → Actinomycetes bacteria become active → they produce geosmin → rain disturbs the soil → geosmin and bacterial particles become airborne → you inhale them → your nose registers petrichor → your immune system encounters Mycobacterium vaccae (an actinomycete) → serotonin production is stimulated → mood lifts, anxiety reduces. You don’t just smell the rain. You are, in a very literal sense, being medicated by it. The forest isn’t just the background for your stroll, it’s the pharmacy.

When your serotonin levels are higher, you feel a deeper sense of belonging, are more confident socially, and have greater patience. When they are lower, you tend towards withdrawing away from others and are more sensitive to rejection, real or perceived. These bacteria and microbes that we have evolved alongside for millions of years, helped form our immune and neurological responses. Does spending all this time indoors, sanitized, and bubble-wrapped instigate more loneliness, anxiety, and depression? I believe, unequivocally, yes. This disconnection is akin to malnourishment. Our bodies and our spirits aren’t getting fed the rich banquet of phytoncides, actinomycetes, geosmin, and who knows how many other beneficial components of that forest pharmacy.

Everything the body needs to feel whole is already present — inside us and suffused throughout the forest. Fascinatingly, we are made of the same material as the thing we keep trying to separate ourselves from. Take chlorophyll and hemoglobin – one breathes for plants; one breathes for humans - they are built on the same ancient molecular framework. At the center of hemoglobin sits an iron atom, which binds oxygen and makes blood red. At the center of chlorophyll sits a magnesium atom, which captures sunlight and makes leaves green. The same core structure. The functional difference between animal breath and plant breath reduced to a single metal atom at the heart of each molecule.

This is a clue that the boundary between humans and forests is more porous and less solid than we think. Humans and leaves are running variations of the same ancient code. The Stoic concept of sympatheia — the idea that all things in the universe are interconnected and mutually interdependent – is worth noting here. Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations that what injures the hive injures the bee. But we can also see that the reverse is also true: what nourishes the forest also nourishes you.

Last week we mentioned that light came before clocks and seasons before schedules. If we are attempting to be more nourished by nature, there is one more link in the chain worth following, the link between rhythm of the body and that of the seasons. Serotonin.

The SCN (the suprachiasmatic nucleus) that controls our biorhythms is signaled by melatonin at the end of the day, telling us it’s time to sleep. Interestingly, serotonin is a precursor to melatonin — your body converts serotonin into melatonin as darkness arrives. These two hormones are a part of the same chain – one transforms into the other. So, it would stand to reason that if you boost your serotonin during the day, you might induce a better night’s sleep. And if you were intentional enough to spend some time outside, breathing in the petrichor on the rain-soaked air, you’re well on your way.

Serotonin is a powerful connector, bringing soil bacteria, mood, melatonin, sleep, light, and our seasonal rhythms into sequence. It is the molecule that most directly demonstrates that the boundary between the natural world and the interior world is not a boundary at all. Remember that afternoon walk in the rain — the petrichor in your lungs, the serotonin emerging — it doesn’t end when you come inside. As the sun sets and twilight pulls a blanket up to your chin, your body begins converting that serotonin into melatonin, and you carry the forest with you into slumber. The boundary was never there. It was always just one long, unbroken conversation between the world outside and the world within.

I want to tell you what you’ve actually walked into.

This is not a wellness newsletter. It’s not a nature facts digest, a mindfulness tip sheet, or a guide to outdoor recreation. There are excellent publications for all of those things. This isn’t one of them.

The Forest Philosopher is a weekly essay that begins in the forest and ends somewhere deeper in what it means to be human. Each piece starts with something I’ve observed — in the woods, in the soil, in the behavior of roots or fungi or light through canopy — and follows that observation toward a question worth sitting with.

My name is David Motzenbecker. I’m a landscape architect, a certified forest therapy guide, and someone who has spent the better part of twenty years professionally attending to the relationship between people and place. I’ve studied Zen gardens in Japan, explored the UK’s tradition of “thin spaces” — those rare landscapes where the veil between the seen and unseen grows thin — and guided hundreds of people into forests to let the trees do what they’ve always done: restore, clarify, and return us to ourselves.

That expertise is in here. But so is something harder to credential: a genuine conviction that the natural world has things to teach us that no classroom, screen, or self-help framework can replicate. And that the act of paying close attention to a forest — really paying attention — is one of the most countercultural and necessary things a person can do right now.

What you’ll find here

Essays arrive weekly, organized by season and theme. Each month builds a cohesive arc — from grounding to exploration, practice to reflection. You don’t need to read in order, but if you do, you’ll find something cumulative happening.

A few of the best places to start:

→ Rooting & Reaching — On community, mycorrhizal networks, and why vulnerability is a forest strategy. This one resonates most with new readers.

→ Awe as a Path of Transformation — On recovering the capacity for wonder in a world that has monetized our attention and dulled our senses.

→ Why “The Forest Philosopher”? Why now? — The origin story, if you want to know who you’re walking with before you go further.

What this is not

This newsletter will not tell you how to optimize your morning routine, hustle harder, or purchase anything. It will not offer five-step frameworks or guaranteed outcomes. The forest doesn’t work that way, and neither do I.

What it will do — if you stay, if you read slowly, if you occasionally put down your phone and go outside — is change the quality of your attention. Quietly. The way trees grow.

One thing I’d love from you

Hit reply on any essay and tell me what you’re noticing. A question, a resonance, something that awed you outside this week. I read every message. Your responses genuinely shape what I write next.

The forest is patient. So am I.

See you in the woods.

— David

The Forest Philosopher publishes every Friday. Essays are free to read. If this work matters to you, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who needs it.

The alarm blares at 5:30am. GET UP it tells us, there is so much you have to do today. Get showered and clad in your tailored suit of armor to face the challenges of the day. Feed the children and yourself, get them to school, get yourself to work, dive into meetings, meetings, and more meetings, then struggle through your Sisyphean to-do list. Pick up the kids from school, figure out how to produce the evening’s sustenance, then collapse onto the sofa, but not before you pay the bills. Oh, and somewhere in there you have to walk the dog, get your own exercise, and find “me” time. I think Herman Hesse said it best, way back in 1905 in his essay On Little Joys, when he offered that “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”

Imagine instead, waking up when light comes through your window, insistent enough to tickle the optic nerve behind your eyelids and rouse you from repose. Your ears collect the gentle, melodious birdsong and a sleepy smile breaks across your face, as you semiconsciously acknowledge those winged creatures have already been going about their May morning for many hours already. That open window that allowed cool night breezes to caress your skin and keep your slumber cool also wafts in the scents of freshly mown lawn, or perhaps petrichor emerging from last night’s soft rain. Awakening like this sets the tone for the day – you still have things to do and work to accomplish – however you are beginning with a different framework.

One of my favorite memories is of a solo vacation I took decades ago to an eco-resort in Mexico. Set on the beach facing the Gulf of Mexico, the complex entailed one large communal palapa for dining and activities, one for the bar, and individual-sized units for each visitor’s “room”. One of the defining features of this locale is that there was no electricity. Each night, staff would take a torch and light smaller torches along the pathways throughout the resort. What began to happen over the course of the week I was there, because of this decision to forgo electricity, was that my circadian rhythms took hold and reasserted themselves.

I was tired and in bed around 9pm, when the sky became dark. I also was waking up when the morning sun began filtering into my tent around 5:30am. Far from feeling tired, I found myself extremely refreshed and energized, more than I had in years. I wasn’t the only one. I noticed that most of the guests that were there during that week, drifted off to bed from the bar around the same time as I did, and many were up early too. Our bodily clocks were re-syncing to the environment. You don’t need to fly to Mexico to feel this. That imagined morning — light through the window, birdsong, petrichor — is available to most of us, most days. The question is whether we’ve built a life that allows us to receive it.

Before clocks, there was light. Before schedules, there were seasons. Once upon a time human beings only parsed their days by nature’s interventions – sunrise/sunset, the moon phases, solstices and equinoxes, planting, harvesting, and first frosts. The calendar of your body was designed hundreds of millions of years ago. The calendar on your wall was designed by a Roman emperor and a medieval pope.

In 45 BCE, Julius Caesar proposed this new way of marking days. The Julian Calendar was presented as a solution to the random and chaotic nature of previous Roman calendars. This calendar was adopted and used throughout the world for over 1,600 years, until Pope Gregory XIII decided something needed to change. The Julian calendar was wreaking havoc with determining the date of Easter, so in 1542 CE the pope ordered his new Gregorian calendar be used instead. This calendar adopts a more accurate count of days and is now used nearly universally across the globe as the standard for timekeeping. Let me be clear, Caesar and Gregory were not villains — they were just humans doing what humans do, imposing order. All this history is just reinforcing that the calendar on your wall, or more likely in your phone, is the result of political decisions, not natural occurrences.

Alternatively, what entity has been timing itself for 400 million years without a single pope or emperor’s intervention? Nature. We are creatures running on an ancient clock, living inside an invented one. As David Farrier writes in Emergence Magazine: “Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene.” Each spring the trees know when to send forth the buds of new leaves, each fall they know just the right moment to let the dead leaves drop. Myriad species know when to lay eggs and where.

The notion of “time” is ridiculous when you truly examine it. Does the universe schedule itself with a 24-hour clock? Not in the slightest. The length of a “day” even varies depending on which planet you find yourself on. Here are the day lengths NASA scientists give for our solar system:

Mercury: 1,408 hours (58.6 Earth days)

Venus: 5,832 hours (243 Earth days)

Earth: 24 hours (23 hours, 56 minutes)

Mars: 25 hours (24 hours, 37 minutes)

Jupiter: 10 hours (9 hours, 55 minutes)

Saturn: 11 hours (10 hours, 33 minutes)

Uranus: 17 hours (17 hours, 14 minutes)

Neptune: 16 hours (15 hours, 57 minutes)

So, if you lived on Venus, your day would last nearly an entire Earth YEAR! Imagine scheduling that day? Or on Jupiter when your entire day would be slightly longer than a typical factory shift here. All the other planets fall somewhere between those two on the spectrum of time. And of course, these measurements are all based on our own human construct. This construct is based on the arbitrary invention of 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, etc. Now take a moment and step away from the solar system and back into your own skin. While the universe observes no clock, your body runs one of the most sophisticated timing systems ever evolved, far more precise than any calendar Caesar or Gregory ever devised.

Inside the hypothalamus, just above where the optic nerves cross, sits a cluster of roughly 20,000 nerve cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus — the SCN. This is your master clock.

Morning light seeping through your eyelids directly signals the SCN, telling your body clock to begin its daylight cycles, the hormone cortisol bubbling over and priming you for a day of activity. It is worth noting that morning light is the most powerful synchronizer of your body clock, much more powerful than your bedside alarm. When darkness arrives, the production of the hormone melatonin takes precedence, pushing us to feel sleepy, and subsequently head to bed. Think of them as our sunrise and sunset hormones. The SCN keeps all of our systems running on schedule. This is why humans historically ate more and slept longer in winter. This is also why forcing identical schedules in every season runs directly against the grain of our embedded biology.

Every species on earth lives inside the clock it evolved with. We are the only one that voluntarily abandoned ours — and called it civilization. The circadian clock is not a metaphor. It is a physical structure, encoded deep in our DNA, and refined, again and again, over hundreds of millions of years. When we choose to override it with fluorescent light, ubiquitous screens, and arbitrary schedules; we are not just bypassing our natural state — we are digging ourselves deeper into a biological debt we don’t always see accumulating.

We are living inside the wrong clock.

Sometime today or tonight, before you check your phone, step outside for two minutes. Notice what time the natural world seems to think it is. Notice the gap between that and whatever your screen says. Don’t try to close the gap — just feel it.

The villagers traveled into the woods with intention. Searching together, they set forth to gather the nine sacred woods that soon would be needed — these included species like rowan, oak, birch, holly, elder, and yew. Yellow flowers would be placed at the threshold of each home, evoking welcome and protection, and blurring the line between inside and out. Then, at sundown on April 30^th, something powerful began. Hearth fires across the village were deliberately put out as darkness began to close over the village. Local priests then started their climb to the highest hilltop nearby to gather ‘fire from heaven,’ or as the villagers knew it – Beltane.

The fire of Bel (the Celtic Sun God Belenus) having been figuratively acquired, the priests lit two sacred fires from the gathered wood of the forest. As the trees released the light acquired across their lifetimes, the villagers then joined the priests atop the hill, dancing, singing, and celebrating this unique time of the year. Feasting commenced with offerings of food and drink being shared with the surrounding landscape. Livestock was driven between the fires three times to ensure their health and fertility for the coming year. This was followed by the entire community itself moving between the fires – together. As the festivities began to wane, each villager would gather an ember and bring it back to their homes – rekindling each hearth throughout the village from the communal fire. The old fire goes out. The new one is lit. This is when “thin spaces” were believed to be most prevalent. The moment when the boundary between us and the animating spirits of the world becomes most permeable. The instant when awe is most available.

This is May 1^st, May Day, and for over a thousand years that can be documented – and almost certainly much longer – it has been known as the Celtic festival of Beltane. This day is the exact midpoint between the spring equinox and summer solstice. What these ancient villagers understood that we have largely forgotten: this threshold must be crossed together, and noticed with reverence and awe.

During the entire month of April, you have been tending your own threshold fires – not on hilltops, but within your attention. The song of the red-winged blackbird that pierced through the veil into the deepest of memories – attending to something with deliberate focus – the beginning of prosoche; the small circle of focus within the woods where eyes were drawn to element after element, taking in each as if a treasure seen for the first time; the sparrow’s nest transforming into a consecrated space for life by giving devoted attention to things discarded by man and nature; and the joy bubbling up at the sight of glistening dewdrops atop strands of emerald moss.

Each of these experiences was a small act of relighting the fire – Whitman knew it when he wrote that ‘a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.’ The Celts extinguished their fires so the new flame could mean something. Awe works the same way — you have to put aside your habit of inattention before reverence can take its place. And just like the Beltane fire – awe was always meant to be carried back into day-to-day life.

When you have practiced seeking awe long enough, it becomes less of an emotion or feeling, and more like second nature. It becomes the way you attune and orient yourself towards the world. You remember when the sparrows started nest building, the recollection of how stunning the blue of the sky was last Tuesday, how the crabapples bloomed a week earlier than last year. This is the movement from awe into rhythm — not a feeling you wait for but a pulse you begin to live inside.

As the weather continues to warm, I spend more and more of my mornings on my back deck watching my yard come alive. I find awe everywhere in my tiny Minneapolis plot of earth. The iridescent purples enrobing shoots of Solomon’s Seal and False Indigo as they stretch out of the soil towards the sun; the minuscule chartreuse buds of new growth appearing on the tips of each yew branch; the panicles of emerging Bleeding Heart flowers bursting out of arching stems. This is where May is taking us – not into a new subject, but deeper into the same one. Now we follow it further on nature’s time.

Beltane was never a solitary celebration. Villagers weren’t staring into the blue light of their digital hearths. Rather their fires were lit together, seasonal and community thresholds crossed arm in arm – collectively. Throughout the month you have been sharing what you’ve noticed. This is our community fire – I invite you to cross the threshold with me.

The threshold is here. May is waiting. After a month of practicing wonder, the question changes. Not: can you feel awe? But: what will you do now that you do? Tell me in the comments — I want to carry your answers into May.