Julene Waffle
Into the Temple of Trees
non-fiction
"The most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality."
—Peter Scott, British Naturalist
I went into the forest today, played pick up sticks with the trees and fetch with the air as the dogs were more interested in where their noses took them. The clanging “should do’s” and “could do’s” finally quieted to a mumble in my brain so I could not understand what the clanging said, and I could walk in nature-silence: a chickadee’s “swee-tee,” a conk-la-ree of a red-winged blackbird near field edges, a far off raven croaking his hoarse hello.
“Hello,” I chirped back.
**
Shinrin-yoku or "forest bathing" is a form of nature therapy created in Japan in 1982, where people are encouraged to visit and spend time and take leisurely walks in a forest or a city park to improve their health. By using all one’s senses while immersing oneself in nature, one lowers one’s cortisol level, pulse rate, blood pressure.
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To dine among trees—a lunch of crusty bread, a soft brie, a simple white grape juice, and a large rock on which to sit—is a favorite way of mine to spend time. If one sits long enough, still enough, one will be witness to a whole world that exists without humans. Chipmunks skitter across footpaths, cheek pouches full of winter stores; deer daintily pick their footing around branches and puddles. Sometimes, a fox darts in the frame, perks his ears, flicks his fat rusty tail, looks quickly here and there, and trots off unalarmed, but always in a hurry. Going unnoticed has a way of filling one up with gladness as only being a part of something larger than oneself can do, and awe and maybe sadness, at the same time, at how easily the earth will turn without you.
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Just living around more trees creates healthier mental states, reports say. In fact, Londoners who live near trees take fewer antidepressants than people who don’t. Just the smell of trees has health benefits. Trees secrete chemicals called phytocides which are linked to improved immune defenses, and the reduction of anxiety. It even increases one’s pain threshold. Reports say that children who spend time in the green outdoors more than those who spend time inside show a decrease in symptoms of ADHD and an increase in creativity and critical thinking. Sometimes just sitting in untreated wooden chairs can have health benefits too.
**
The leaves flame the hillsides around Otsego Lake, the bastard sister of the Finger Lakes 145 miles west. I sit on the banks of the Fenimore Museum’s outdoor amphitheater waiting in the late afternoon to watch a production of Our Town. In spite of the breathtaking quilted patterns on the hills, the frothy waves lapping the shore, the great slow-moving sailboats on the water, I cannot take my eyes off the four immense oak trees towering above me, dipping their toes in the lake in front of me. They must be four hundred years old. They stand like castle turrets that have watched history unfold itself. I am in love with the wonder of the lines and contours of them and bits of history recorded in their rings that foretell our futures.
I can’t help but think how these trees must have admired Haudenosaunee building canoes to fish its depths when fish were thick, and could be pulled out with only the effort of using a net. Or how they must have mourned the last passenger pigeon shot from the sky, and dressed for dinner. Or even how they might have marveled at General Clinton’s ingenuity to dam its outlet, then breach that dam, making military history, so his army could ride the wave of the unbridled lake down the Susquehanna to meet General Sullivan’s embattled soldiers.
Today, these trees witness nothing that will ever see the pages of a history book. Every day, they note the passing of pontoon boats or tourists in kayaks or fishermen in small canoes. They might glimpse from the tops of their crowns snippets of golfers playing two- or three-hundred-dollar rounds of golf on pristinely manicured fairways and greens. Or sometimes, as tonight, they might watch as Grover’s Corners peeks from behind the narration of the play and Cooperstown ducks and weaves itself into the dreams of the evening, glinting between dock lights and lake house spotlights, and stars igniting the darkness of the deep lake like fireflies floating the surface, blinking a Morse Code few choose to read. Those trees see people in their lawn chairs here or sitting uncomfortably on blankets after a two-hour performance. They see the women in front of me who whispered in the quiet parts of the play about little nothings of their days. The trees see them, their red shoes, their perfectly quaffed hair, their bangles, ties, the occasional pocket kerchief, the spilled drink, the hand holding as dark approaches; they see all their tired eyes, but the people don’t see the trees.
**
In Edinburgh, scientists placed mobile EEG sensors on experiment participants. As they moved from urban places to green spaces, their brains shifted. From stressed states they moved toward calm: their brain chatter decreased, their amygdala—the almond-shaped region, deep in their brains that detects fear and controls fight or flight reactions—the amygdala calmed down and let the participants rest.
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One theorist, Miyazaki, believes that shinrin-yoku is so effective because green spaces are in our genes. Human natural history—in fact, 99.99 percent of the time our ancestors have lived on this planet—has been immersed in a natural environment. We have carved our lives in the woods of the earth. People have only been living in urban settings for a few hundred years; our genes cannot change that fast. We are genetically unprepared to live an urban lifestyle.
**
In the temple of those oak trees, my youngest sits with me as still as a ten-year-old boy can, paints my lips with potato chips. By the end of play, when the last scene arrives—birth and life and growing up having already made their appearances on stage and death makes his subtle entrance, my boy plants his too-big self on my lap and I don’t push him away. He covers us with a blanket and, in the waning minutes of the play, of the evening, he whispers awe and points, “Those trees are so big.” I smile, satisfied he saw them.
Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher, a family woman, an animal and nature lover, a businesswoman, and a writer. Her work has appeared in The English Journal, La Presa, Mslexia, The Ekphrastic Review, The Non-Conformist, and The Adroit Journal, among other journals and anthologies, and her chapbook So I Will Remember. Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com, Facebook: Julene Waffle, Twitter: @JuleneWaffle, and Instagram: julenewaffle.