Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Recently, I’ve come to this conclusion: I’d rather live in a dense forest than in a dense city, although my life has chiefly played itself out in small and big metro areas: grids of street lights, honking traffic, glass buildings, sports teams, museums, restaurants, the whole noise and rush of living. Yet, after nearly two decades in Vermont and many treks through woods across the country, I’m vibing on what science is just beginning to tout and tout loudly; trees heal. Which is why forest bathing, or Shinrin-yoku, is finding its way as a wellness practice. Even sauntering through a city park triggers nature’s rewards and alleviates the stress of our frenzied existence.

Yet, there’s another phenomenon afoot. I believe nature revises us. As we stroll slowly beneath the earth’s giants, amidst fungi, moss, lichen, and ferns, we are being workshopped in dappled light. What’s restorative isn’t merely the smells and sounds of woodlands, chirping birds and glimpses of wildlife. We are forced to confront the illusions of modern life. We are awash with a simplicity that takes us to idylls of clarity, that encourages introspection. We are reoriented toward human’s first encounter with beauty. It might be, too, that the trees, in communicating amongst themselves across distances, connect us even more to earth’s innate will toward life.

Today’s mesmerizing poem reminds me to locate the sources of my creative self in nature, and highlights its intensifying way of setting anew what matters in the human world . . . a bountiful and generative love.

Forestbathing (or Trees)
by francine j. harris

    for JW

Trees in other cities gather
and send out information. The beech,
the sylvatica, the Chinese birch judging

from the smell of diverted root.
I get more done with you in these curated woods.
Time now, is my humility. It scooches over

when we sit out under hydrangea, on a stone bench.
I trust you with the hammock and I lie beneath your
spiders in the wind. The Japanese garden is closed at this hour.

A group of teenagers gather with a chaperone and reach laughing
for wax bags they are told are full of squash sandwiches. There is always 
another hill to climb and those kids were, all of them, brown.

One day I won’t have to say how gravel gathers sun, but 
today we mention its shutterframe. We talk about its dance in 
orange petals. In this city, roads shoot up and we don’t 
park on them. We drive roundabout and try not
to think too slow.

Someone here in Boston always wants you 
out of the way. But I remember the branch as it sways.
And I remember how much I have loved. And I remember
watching others light fire and wanting to get inside it.
And I want to ask, but don’t

if then, were we more like trees, sending out seed signals
on a breeze. Reaching for each other in the dark where
it is cooler and want is damp. Or are we more like trees now.
Sedentary. Old and stock. Endangered and disbelieved.

“foresbathing (or Trees)" by francine j. harris from HERE IS THE SWEET HAND © 2020 francine j. harris. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.