“We need hope like we need air.”
Brené Brown
What is the basic unit of existence? What a daring question, right? And isn’t it the job of scientists – astrophysicists, quantum physicists, biologists and other qualified professionals – to ponder on it and help us, laypeople, untangle the complexity of the web of life? Isn’t it why the James Webb telescope was designed – to look for bits of life millions of light years away in high definition? Isn’t it why particle accelerators were built – to look for elements smaller than protons? And so, humanity is on a quest to go farther and farther, to find smaller and smaller constituents, and to try explaining with the help of science what indigenous peoples around the world knew all along: life equals connection, life comes from connection, life thrives on connection. Connection is everything, but unfortunately, we are not very good at it. As Robin Wall Kimmerer mentions in Braiding Sweetgrass, “It has been said that people of the modern world would suffer a great sadness, a ‘special loneliness’ – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.”2 I can humbly add from my life experience that my survival depended on stepping back into connection. I offer the reader my story about coming back to life after experiencing profound loss.
In October 2019, I lost my brother. My mother lost her son. There we were, separated by thousands of miles, grieving apart and together at the same time. Life as I knew it was no more. I lost one of the most important people in my life, and I also lost a whole world – the future, happy world with hopes and dreams connected to my brother. I wasn’t much interested in living. Loss begets grief; grief begets dissociation and an existential crisis. You see, grief can be very isolating. Our modern society does not have tolerance for grief. With its toxic positivity, the drive to prettify everything thanks to social media, and inherent duality (you are either this or that – either whole or broken, either happy or sad), grief is expected to be private, hidden, suppressed. In many places around the world, ancestral mourning rituals have long been lost, so there’s no support framework that helps a grieving person feel witnessed and acknowledged (Wojcik & Dobler, 2017) 3. In my case, while some people have embraced me in my grief, others have defaulted to the algorithms prescribed by our modern culture – time heals all wounds, others have it worse, every cloud has a silver lining, and things will work out in the end. Such reactions to someone’s loss and grief are hurtful and contribute to dissociation, disconnection, and isolation. I was angry and questioning everything, ruminating over “what ifs”, and wondering if there was any meaning to life at all. And when the pandemic took over the world, collective fear, mourning, and pain overshadowed individual stories of loss.
花鳥風月(kachou fuugetsu) – flower, bird, wind, and moon
This famous Japanese proverb has a meaning larger than the sum of its constituents – “learning about yourself through experiencing the beauty of nature.”5
In April 2021, I started the Nature & Forest Therapy Guide training with ANFT hoping to alleviate the isolation and disconnect. The training cohort group became a community and a safe place where I felt welcome exactly as I was, where it was absolutely fine to move at my own pace and engage as much or as little as I could. Everything and everyone was welcome. The trainers embodied and projected the Way of the Guide – a philosophy about “letting go of controlling other people’s process, and instead creating a space where people can find their own way.”6 Every learning module, assignment, interaction and trainer-guided walk were rich in discovery and full of invitations to sensory experiences. They were a precursor to some of the most profound encounters I’ve had.
August 2021, Travel Notes
Orocovis, Puerto Rico
It’s starting to rain hard as I make my way up the stairs to a launching pad. I’m one more thrill seeker in a long line of daredevils waiting to zipline in horizontal position at over 1200 feet high at a speed of 95 m/hr. My self-preservation mechanism is telling me to run to safety, but my stubbornness prevails. And so I’m launched. At this height and speed, I am one-on-one with my body, my fear, and physics. Add to that the rain drops that are hitting my face at a tremendous speed. A very rich sensory experience indeed. The mind is deprived of opportunities to analyze, rationalize, or judge.
Because of the torrential downpour, I cannot see much in any direction. The valley over which I’m “flying” is obscured by a mist – trillions of tiny droplets that different surfaces bounce back into the air. And then, the rain stops and the sun comes out. What I see below is shades of emerald-green, glistening leaves, groups of trees of slightly different heights and shapes, a river filled with fresh rainwater gushing through the mountain… What I see is not just a landscape, a pretty view. I’m gifted a realization, a knowing beyond doubt that I’m witnessing community and continuity, as if time and space have both converged and expanded. Singularity and multiplicity are coexisting right here, right now. I feel like a transformer, previously disassembled, coming together in a flash as one solid entity. I suddenly feel whole. This transformation stems from embodiment and hence is not cognitive. It’s lived.
Rincón, Puerto Rico
Caribbean Sea before a storm… Clear turquoise water no more, there’s a lot of grey as I start on a snorkeling tour, trying to quiet my fear of deep waters and breathe. Although I never learned to swim, the fear is irrational – I’m wearing a life vest. A few dozen feet from the shore, there are grey kingdoms of bleached corals. A reminder of what once was. Sadness… We swim a bit farther, over a ridge – and suddenly it’s a party, a celebration of life. Bursts of color, various shapes, fish swimming to and from, underwater “trees” swaying in the currents. It’s a forest, full of diversity and connections. I’m sensing that community and continuity again. The distance between the sadness of the bleached corals and this exuberance is just a few feet. My body, with the help of that life vest, of course, has brought me to witness magic. Momentarily, the fear is gone and my heart fills with overwhelming gratitude – for my body, my senses, and my cognitive abilities that have made it possible to experience awe right here and right now. I feel like I belong too – both at this vibrant party and with the sadness of the bleached corals simultaneously. I feel whole. I feel resilient.
Once I experienced this wholeness, I started recognizing connections in everything.
The ANFT training is such a gift in this regard. It holds a promise of connection. Through relearning to be in touch with nature both on the outside and within, it’s possible to be more present and integrated into the community and continuity of life. Through becoming a nature and forest therapy guide, it’s possible to rebuild old and create new connections with the human and more-than-human world. Such connections come not from a place of fear, lack, or cultural conditioning, but from a deep knowing that we are an integral part of each other, and that each of us is inherently whole. And one doesn’t need to engage in extreme sports or conquer one’s fear of swimming to relearn this. Connections are literally everywhere – in space and under our feet8, in tree canopies and in our DNA. They are in our thoughts and daily conversations. Even something as simple as words of spoken languages or signs of sign languages can be a pathway to connection. Language is available to all of us, so everyone has equal access. This is a revelation that found me relatively recently, even though I have been studying linguistics for almost two decades.
Words and signs are as much a part of nature as flowers, birds, or clouds. They are links in a string of continuity carrying forth wisdom and knowledge through family trees and communal living, expressing the breadth of the human experience, and serving as a mediation tool between us and our environment. There are amazing and complex connections that exist within language systems and among them. For example, we can only understand the word “kindness” in English because it exists in a semantic relationship with words like “sympathy”, “warmth”, “pity”, and “indifference”. We can only understand an anecdote because it makes sense in the context of a certain culture to which we belong, and culture is always communal. We can learn a second or a third language only because we all are expert users of our first one, imparted to us by our caregivers and to them – by theirs. There are layers upon layers of relationships and links. And it gets more interesting! Although the linguistic landscape is rapidly changing, there are still places around the world where hundreds of languages are endemic to a relatively compact area. Not accidentally, these places are brimming with biodiversity. When researchers looked closer at these locations, they coined the term “biolinguistic diversity” that reflects this correlation between abundance in species and linguistic systems.9 It was determined that the areas along the equator are “hotbeds” of biolinguistic diversity, hosting 50-90% of the earth’s species and the majority of the world’s languages. In Papua New Guinea alone about 860 different languages are spoken. The richness of the environment as well as natural processes and cycles are encoded in these languages, allowing their speakers to interact with nature in a respectful and sustainable way. The Philippines is another example of biolinguistic diversity. The Haunóo people there have distinct names for over 450 types of animals and 1,500 plants. Talk about taxonomies! They grow over 400 plants in their gardens and have names for 30 types of soil, which allows them to be efficient farmers, maintaining diversity and cultivating sustainably.10 Such robust biolinguistic systems are stable and resilient because of myriads of connections that exist within and between species (human species included), between words and plants, traditional practices, moon cycles, tidal patterns, etc. There’s lots of hope in this.
Looking for connections has become my daily practice. Sometimes it’s as simple as observing the play of light and shadow at my sit spot or watching a bee crawling over flowers. Other times, it’s reading a book or a scientific article and realizing that they are a link to knowledge made freely available by their writer.
I have no doubt now that the basic unit of existence IS connection.
May this story serve as an invitation to look for connections in whichever form they are available to you. Nature has your back.
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1 Cover Photo by David Clode https://unsplash.com/photos/xFqH9peAlmw?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink
2 Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed editions.
3 https://theconversation.com/what-ancient-cultures-teach-us-about-grief-mourning-and-continuity-of-life-86199 4 Photo by Zoltan Tasi. https://unsplash.com/photos/vHnVtLK8rCc?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink
5 Longhurst, E. N. (2018). A little Book of Japanese Contentments: Ikigai, Forest Bathing, Wabi-sabi, and More. Chronicle Books.
6 Ben Crow Page. (2020) A Guide’s Handbook of Forest Therapy.
7 Photo by Francesco Ugaro. https://unsplash.com/photos/MJ1Q7hHeGlA?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink
8 Simard, S. (2021). Finding the mother tree: uncovering the wisdom and intelligence of the forest. Penguin UK.
9 “Biolinguistic diversity relates to a common repository of the rich spectrum of life encompassing all the earth’s species of plants and animals along with human cultures and their languages.”
10 Nettle, D., & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. Oxford University Press on Demand.