Shinrin-yoku and the forest as my guru

Commemorating one year as a countryfied city girl

Exactly one year ago, I packed my entire life into a moving van and drove 400 miles north into the Sierra Nevada foothills, leaving the city behind for what I hope will be forever.

It feels like the length of a heartbeat, the way we move through time, the quickness with which a day becomes a month becomes a year. It seems like only moments ago I was bidding farewell to the place that birthed me, the place that raised me and reared me, ushered me through the dark night of my soul and into my deepest expansion. Los Angeles will always be my heart, but NorCal is my home.

July 1, 2024 | 7:55 am

I arrived here in the peak of summer, wondering how my coastal bones would fare in the triple digits, and I’ve since beared witness to the shapeshifting landscape across all four seasons. I’ve seen oaks and maples turn golden and bare as the days waned short. I’ve hunted for fungi in the cold and wet, placed my palms against mossy trunks, watched snow fall from my bedroom window. I’ve stumbled upon purple super blooms of iris and lupine, driven down country roads painted orange with California poppies, beheld the springtime magic of goslings and ducklings skimming across the pond.

My departure from the city was owed to many things, not the least of which being that while I was indeed born there, under no circumstances could I allow myself to die there. But I left when I did because I simply could no longer afford to live in Los Angeles: not financially, not emotionally, and not spiritually most of all. My craving for trees was not sated by those planted on sidewalks, whose roots grew rowdy and rebellious in their containment. My yearning for stars was not met by the faint glimmer of Orion’s Belt. My thirst for space became unquenchable as my proclivity for slowness became less and less compatible with city life.

While this past year in the woods has offered me a myriad opportunities for growth, the houseplants I brought with me have not met the same fate. My once abundant botanical collection of over 100 potted companions has dwindled significantly, with many of the survivors struggling to hang on; they are city plants, through and through, unfit for the temperatures and light conditions of their new environment. I lost both my temperamental fiddle fig and my rhaphidophora tetrasperma almost immediately, and all of my cacti and succulents have shriveled and blackened in protest. I have done what I can to nourish them, to salvage them, but mostly I have learned to accept their passing.

RIP Albus

When I lived in LA, a dying plant would absolutely devastate me. I’d fight tooth and nail to save it, dramatically mourning its loss when I failed. Today, as the last leaf of my beloved rubber plant fell, I was surprised by how easily I allowed the loss to pass through me. I realize now that my plant collection began as a way to mitigate my disconnection from nature as a city dweller. Because I could not step outside and into the green, I brought the green inside and into my space. Starved as I was for the wild, my emotional connection to my houseplants was a direct result of my desire to live amongst the trees.

As I write this, a gentle summer breeze blows through the oaks outside my window; the pines, towering as they do on slender stalks, sway ever so slightly. A Spotted Towhee sings atop their branches and I can hear nothing but the arboreal soundtrack of an ecosystem, undisturbed. There are no honking horns. No neighbors stomping overhead. No music blaring from passing cars. There is only the wind and its music. There is only the forest that is mine.

It hasn’t been an easy year, not for me, not for anyone. My personal grief has stretched wide, from learning to live without seeing my son’s face every day to processing the complex emotions of my mother’s mental health episodes. I’ve spent more time alone than ever before and understood what it means to be the Hermit, in earnest. I have struggled financially as I slowly inch my way out of debt, cohabitating with my elderly uncle as a necessity, challenging my patience and sanity as I do. I have battled the unpredictable, often debilitating, symptoms of perimenopause in a for-profit medical system that treats women’s pain as a prevarication. More recently, the anguish of witnessing war waged on my ancestral homeland has been overwhelming, a ripped open childhood wound of existing while Iranian in America and everything nuanced that entails.

My collective grief is similar to yours, I would imagine. Every day there are new reasons to be outraged, new temptations towards hopelessness in a world that steadily burns. The treatment of immigrants by this country’s administration, especially in the city of my birth, has brought me to my knees, and always, of course, there is my grief for Palestine—for its children, for its mothers and fathers, for its olive trees and its za’atar, a perpetual ache I cannot and will not ignore.

But what I have discovered along this trip around the sun as a countryfied city girl, is that all of my grief is more bearable here. My emotions are more tempered, my reactions less severe. Things that would have once rendered me onto the edge of the abyss no longer do. I have only stared once into the void, only swallowed a clonazepam twice. I am more at peace than I have ever been in my adult life, despite the storm that rages in and outside of me.

I didn’t solve all of my problems by leaving the city but I certainly made myself more capable of managing them, and I know that’s on account of the trees.

In Japan, this type of therapeutic treatment is called shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. The concept, named in 1982 by the director of Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Tomohide Akiyama, refers to spending intentional time in nature without the distraction of electronics. Listening, touching, smelling and observing the forest in the practice of shinrin-yoku has been shown to profoundly affect the mental health and overall wellbeing of forest bathers, as well as decrease their cortisol and blood pressure. This is what it really means to touch grass, to mindfully engage our senses with the natural world until we remember that we are not, in fact, separate from it.

The lessons I’ve learned and the wisdom I’ve earned over this past year have been plentiful, but none among them have been more powerful than the practice of shinrin-yoku. Every day I walk amongst these trees and their inhabitants, without headphones to listen to the audiobooks, meditations, and music that I relied upon so heavily while taking my daily walks in an urban setting. At first, it was a measure of security: when walking in these woods, one needs to be fully alert to the presence of wildlife. Later it became a matter of preference: who needs music when the forest is a symphony? Who needs a guided meditation when the forest is your guru? Who needs an audiobook when the forest has its own story to tell?

And so I embark on my second year in the foothills with gratitude for what this forest has given me and what it has taken from me, besides. I am not the same as I was when I came here, and I look forward to seeing who else I become.