I trained to become a nature and forest therapy guide in the summer of 2017 with Cohort 15. Since then, I have been involved with the training and/or mentoring of almost 300 guides. As I round the bend of the halfway point of my 13th training with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT), here is some of what I’ve learned about being a guide as well as a trainer of guides.
First, I want to highlight the eclecticism of our international training team and the ways that each of our cultural backgrounds, perspectives, studies and varied lived experiences have informed the ANFT guide training. In an effort for each of us to confidently stand behind what we are teaching, there is deep care that goes into our work of training guides. We have regular ongoing trainer meetings, long email threads and in-person gatherings where we are in an evolving conversation around concepts, language, and teaching styles. We are encouraged to bring our own creative approaches to the training and are always looking for places to improve while also making our best efforts to be aligned as a team. We challenge one another, pushing back, leaning in, and taking turns getting up at 1am to attend virtual trainer meetings so that we can all connect from our respective corners of the Earth despite our varying time zones. It is a commitment that goes beyond any one cohort or training immersion, and it is bigger than any one of us. There is a lot of passion on the ANFT team and an epic wealth of knowledge and experience. We have all mentored and been mentored by each other in some way, and speaking for myself, I’ve encountered many edges and grown quite a bit since becoming a trainer.
One of the biggest edges I’ve encountered has been claiming my seat on the training team and knowing the gifts I bring as a guide of guides. I am someone who tends to hold back, carefully discerning where to put my time and energy because once I decide to commit to something, I tend to go all in. Choosing to belong, in roles and places where I am unsure or uneasy, has been one of the ways I encounter my growing edges.
Those who train to become nature and forest therapy guides come from all experiences and there really is not one particular type of person that is drawn to the guide training. We often begin each training’s orientation with a round of introductions that include asking folks how they found their way to the training. Some are here to heal, to try something new, to learn more, and a common answer is that many folks find their way here because they see themselves as “nature people.” The more I hear this qualifying experience, the more I find myself wondering, what and who is a “nature person?”
I am a 43 year-old white gender expansive queer settler living on the ancestral homelands of the Pawtucket and Massachusett People along the Muddy River in what is modernly known as Boston, Massachusetts. My paternal line made their way to North America from Western Europe sometime in the mid 1800s. My maternal line descended from Eastern Europe, making me a third generation US born and the first of my Ashkenazi ethnic line to be baptized Protestant, in accordance with my paternal grandparents’ wishes. Despite this particular ceremony, I was not raised within any one particular religious or spiritual community. I’ve been free to find my own story and improvise my rites of passage. I am the first of four generations to not take a union job with the railroad. Born in 1978, on the tail end of Generation X, my youth was heavily influenced by skateboarding and punk rock through which I began appreciating the natural beauty of urban decay, where creative expression and ceremony could transform one’s relationship to a sense of place.
I was about 3 or 4 years old when I began physically fighting my way out of frilly dresses and exhibiting classic gender dysphoric behaviors. I began having total meltdowns, repulsed by traditionally feminine clothing, toys and hair bows. My folks surrendered to my natural inclinations towards a masculine of center way of being, despite harsh criticism and judgment from other family members, schoolteachers, community members and peers. They both had experienced their own unpleasant experiences of being othered from their families related to their identities and life choices. There were circumstances where the lines were drawn and I had to painfully conform to typical binary gender roles that matched the one that I was assigned at birth, but for the most part they just let me be. My experience growing up in queer gender liminality is a big part of what informs my guiding practice.
My parents grew up in tight urban neighborhoods of Boston. The railroad eventually brought my dad out to a small control booth in a quaint little suburb, where I made friends with the big old tree in the backyard. It was at the base of this elder pine that I buried my first pet, Fluffy the hamster. With a butter box for a coffin, we dug a small grave under the tree, and I would visit Fluffy’s resting spot, marked with a stone, and get lost in daydreams and miniature fantasy worlds. I explored and played in the backyards of my neighbors’ houses, picking flowers, hopping fences, blissfully ignorant to private land boundaries until someone would yell from a window to get out of their yard. I built forts in the overgrown peripheral wild spots, doing kid stuff and simply playing outside where puddles became oceans and twigs became giant logs. Despite my family’s severed lineage and multi-generational disconnect from unknown lands of origin or traditional ancestral practices, do these simple playful childhood experiences qualify me as a “nature person”?
My guide journey really began in 2016. I was self-employed as “Handy Tam” doing odd jobs for people in my neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, a part of Boston, Massachusetts. I was also working as a custodian at a local historic New England-style craft schoolhouse established in the late 1600s, where I taught children’s woodworking and basic home repair classes to adults. I had been volunteering as an adult mentor for almost a decade with the oldest LGBTQ+ youth program in the US. Despite having a nice routine that included many sweet connections to people and places, I was feeling a strong urge to respond to a calling that was distracting me from being able to be fully present in the work I was doing. I was experiencing a combination of feeling burnt out and disconnected, mixed with a yearning to explore a mysterious curiosity.
I started planning a month-long hiking trip from Canada to Massachusetts via the Long Trail, a 272-mile hiking trail that runs vertically through the state of Vermont. It was something I had fantasized about doing ever since I went on my first overnight backpacking trip in the Bigelows of Western Maine. I was 36 and had only ever gone overnight backpacking for a few days. I had never left the neighborhood where I had been living since 1998 for more than a couple weeks. With the support and blessings of all the right people, I was able to sort out my many responsibilities and commitments in order to make my hike possible.
My hiking trip became a quest. I started preparing a year in advance, reading books, blogs and stories written by those who had thru-hiked the Long Trail, and other longer trails like the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide and the Pacific Crest Trail and trails that I had not heard of. I learned the lingo and various trail terminology. I started hiking nearby trails to condition myself. I experimented with trail dinner recipes, practicing dehydrating food and then rehydrating them into hot lunches with my camp stove on day hikes. I learned about the flora and fauna. I studied maps paying careful attention to the watersheds of the green mountains of Vermont. I vacuumed the woodshop with extra vigor. I emptied the many industrial trash barrels at the schoolhouse imagining that I was in a race, running up and down the stairs with the barrels, carrying them as if I was competing in a weight-lifting competition. I would literally “run” my errands, jogging between the bank, the hardware store and my apartment, trotting down the sidewalk in my work pants and boots.
My decision to thru-hike the Long Trail was the best way I knew how to nurture the parts of me that felt disconnected and existentially homesick from a conceptual idea of a distant knowing of “home” that felt many generations removed. I had no particular connection to Vermont per se, but the Long Trail was just a few hours’ drive from where I lived, and the length felt do-able. I felt that the challenging terrain and the unknowns would be just enough to test me in all the ways I was craving to be pushed. The parts of me that had forgotten the nature of my innate being were desperately needing an intervention from the overly complex routines of urban living.
I successfully walked down the entire state of Vermont in about 26 rugged days, apprenticing myself to the rocks and roots, waters and forests, through rain, heat, cold and wind. I returned home a bit feral and resistant to indoor living. I struggled with the concept of time and life purpose and found myself feeling even more disconnected in some ways.
In my search for how to incorporate my journey across the mountains of Vermont, I recalled an experience I had just a few months before my hike where I had attended a day-long program with a teacher through a local meditation center who guided us through the forest, inspired by the practice of forest bathing. I was moved by this simple yet intuitive way of connecting in the forest by simply slowing down and intentionally opening my senses. It seemed obvious, but it wasn’t. For all my hiking adventures and time spent outside in nature, it was like an entirely new door had been opened. I began my search looking for people and places to practice more forest bathing and quickly found my way to ANFT. With some slight hesitation, I went ahead and applied to become a certified forest therapy guide. Grateful for a purpose and a goal, I poured myself into handy work, motivated to make and save money towards this next adventure.
I brought the same energy and dedication that I had brought in preparation for my Long Trail hike to my preparations in becoming a guide. I listened to every audiobook and podcast I could find about nature connection and the health science of forest bathing while having small epiphanies from the top rung on my ladder while working in various people’s homes, painting and fixing things. I practiced guiding my partner and talked incessantly about forest bathing to anyone who would listen. I started networking and formed a working collaboration with the Arnold Arboretum, seeking formal permission to guide forest therapy which would ultimately lead to ongoing future programming.
The week-long training intensive rocked me. I cried a lot. I was physically sick with social anxiety, being extra cautious and careful about who I connected with from my cohort out of self-protection but ultimately made some nice connections with a few sweet folks. I missed half of the content being taught to us by our wonderful trainers, distracted by the dappling light, the flickering leaves in the warm summer breeze, and my wandering thoughts. Thankfully I took good notes and asked lots of questions, but it would take some time before I understood the concepts and the lingo. Trusting my nature connection journey was a learning curve in and of itself. I spent lots of time journaling and doodling at my sit spot, mapping trails, tracking my web of interbeing and eventually guiding lots of walks. I guided my first forest bathing walk as part of a Queer youth backpacking trip with The Venture Out Project who shared their noticings of kinship with trees of all textures, sizes, ages, and types reflecting back the story of how the current cultural manifestation of conformity is not the full nature of life.
I began to notice that some of my friends and family began to associate me as a “nature person,” and I started receiving campy gifts like socks with trees on them and nature-themed crafts. Acquaintances would come to me with their stories of connecting with a tree. I thought it was weird at first as I didn’t see myself as any more of an Earthling than anyone else, but I noticed that others saw me as having some kind of next level special relationship with the trees. The only difference I felt was that I was more aware of the trees, the rocks, the waters, and the animals, but I knew that was no more a part of the web of life than any other being.
Despite having since dedicated my entire vocation to building and supporting relationships of interbeing by paying closer attention to our interconnectedness via guiding forest therapy and training forest therapy guides, I do not see myself as any more connected to nature than the next being. I may be paying closer attention but regardless, the connection exists. Being a guide simply sharpens the focus and lights up the path of exploration and remembering but we are all on our own journey. The process can be complex and is often deeply personal despite our best efforts to share or explain it to others. As an urban dweller living along a diesel route with an active fire station just a block from my second-floor apartment, I am very much on my own path.
Whenever we define ourselves as “nature people,” I consider our chronic amnesia regarding the one place where every single human intersects. In our yearning to remember and reconnect to that which created us, so many of us struggle to remember that we are Earthlings. Even though we are all tethered to this planet, we struggle over a lack of meaning or belonging. Our divide is made wider by our super high-speed human evolution devolving us into creating complex social systems of oppressions, that control and determine who gets to be in relationship with which lands and waters and how, exploiting our very own habitat and fellow species with abandon.
To be a guide is to know our innateness and to authentically acknowledge our intersectional tellurianism. It is brave to walk the guide’s path. It takes courage to stand in solidarity with the land in ways that may be less understood by our friends and families.
I am a guide who sits in the seat of grief, listening to our stories of incomprehensible pain and loss, ecological dismay and disorientation. I hold these vulnerable stories as sacred gifts, carrying these threads with great care, weaving them together, allowing them to become part of me, letting them transform me.
I am a mentor who will read your watershed story and be moved to tears, reconsidering my own relationship with water. I am a mentor who will read your essay on the history of the land where you reside and then go on a deep search to learn more. I am a mentor who is inspired by your stories about your sit spot finding you, and how a weed transforms into a medicinal tea, and how you turned your land into a sanctuary giving it back to the turtles. I am a mentor who is joyfully guided by your poetic invitations, motivated to open my heart by your many deep abiding acts of love and compassion inspired by your guiding journey.
So much of what I was seeking when I started this journey has become something beyond anything I could imagine. Claiming my seat as a guide of guides has been a rollercoaster. I wasn’t sure I belonged. I wasn’t sure I was enough of a “nature person”. The one thing I was sure of all along has been my determination to follow this path as far as it could go, leaning into all the shadows along the way. The longer I’ve been on it, the clearer it has been that I am doing the work that weaves us back together, celebrating my story as a deeply curious passionate dreamer.
Whether or not you know yourself to be an Earthling, however you hold your understanding of creation, your story is needed. May all our paths lead us back to knowing our inherent nature so that we may know the nature in all beings, reminding us of our interconnection, and closing the gaps between us and our precious planet.
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To get more involved with Tam’s work and find out about upcoming programs, go to https://www.toadstoolwalks.com/ and http://acornprograms.com
To read the details of Tam’s Vermont Long Trail adventure, go to https://cariboose.wordpress.com/vermont-long-trail/
To read a detailed account of Tam’s first guided forest therapy walk with The Venture Out Project go to