Moving my head/eyes around and breathing green in. Actually a lot of grey and brown, it’s mid-March, not a lot of green yet. Probably 85% brown and grey when you forget about the blue sky. It’s all green to me.
I’m in the Woods with my girlfriend and our dog. She is reading a book by an Italian and telling me about what’s happening in it. He is tearing fallen branches apart with his mouth. I think both of these are tasks with merit. Actually he just started digging a hole I think - not sure because the orange hammock my girlfriend is laying in is partially blocking my view of over there.
This is what I call Woods Time. Woods Time is Time you spend in the Woods. For me the Woods are mostly the state parks around the city where I live. The Time is every second I can scrape off the bones of my life and gather up and squish together into a few hours out here.
For you it could be in some other Woods, with whatever Time you can manage outside of those first two places. You will look at the tallest branches of the towering trees like the skeleton arms of ancient giants stretching across the sky and get so lost you forget about the grey/brown ground. One of the best parts is you don’t even need that much Woods. You’re going to want to minimize the viewing potential of non-Woods entities (buildings, cars, electrical wiring, etc.), and of course features like streams or cool looking rocks can add tremendously to your audio-visual pleasure. But honestly as long as you’ve got like 3 trees and can’t see a building you’re set. In a great stroke of luck, there are parks that have 3+ trees in many parts of the world.
Despite what may be your best efforts not to, you will inevitably think about non-Woods related agenda items at certain points in your Time. But then you will see a plant that you have never seen before and examine its leaves/stems/thorns very closely. Or a rusty piece of metal on the ground and you try to imagine what it was, once. Or a bug on the ground and you follow him around for a while to see what his agenda items look like.
On one of my best ever Woods Times I hovered over a wolf spider while he crisscrossed a grassy field for upwards of 30 minutes. His agenda items remain unclear to me, but observing his journey was very pleasurable to me nonetheless. Like me, bugs with their meandering seem like they would be interested in media that is less plot-driven and more atmosphere-focused.
I know the Woods are working their magic on me when I start to feel a little stoned, drawn inwards to myself. In the concrete corners of the earth things can seem like they’re designed to drag you out of yourself, eliminate all your deeper, immaterial thoughts. In the Woods things exist without motive - when you watch a branch sway back and forth in the breeze for long enough, it’ll sweep away enough dust for you to be comfortable in parts of your mind that you don’t usually visit.
Meditating is the ancient act of removing all external stimuli in order to find something within yourself. At work and home we face an unprecedented barrage of stimuli that forces us to sacrifice great amounts of our Time. There are still lots of things going on in the Woods, but they’re leaves waving, birds singing, breezes blowing. Somewhere near me, a woodpecker is producing power tool noises banging his head against a tree. I’m kind of over it, but I hope he gets his worm. This isn’t perfect meditation, but the stoned bliss-indifference rolling over my shoulders might be close to it. Meditation has been shown to have about the same effect on depression patients as pharmaceutical antidepressants; Woods Time might have the same effect as going to church.
I’ve heard the term Forest Bathing before, so I’m not the first to find meaning and health in Time in the Woods. It’s pretty big in Japan, where they call it shinrin-yoku. And Woods Time has been going on for even longer than meditation - I think the naked couple who ate an apple in the garden and I learned about them at bible camp may have been the founders. The Garden of Eden, of course, was the Woods.
You may have noticed my capitalization of Woods and Time by now, a mark of the God-reverence I hold for Woods and Time. Where is God if not in the Woods? We can eat apples all day in our homes and apartments, but we can only be guests in the place He deemed too good for us. The tree-temples are His, can never belong to anyone besides everyone and maybe especially the bugs/squirrels that call them home.
Sometimes I lay down on a windy day and the treetop movement that’s going on is pretty disconcerting. The creaking noises burrow deep into your ears when your eyes are seeing that kind of power. I’ve seen the giant limbs sway, and I’ve seen downed monuments. But I’ve never seen a tree fall, and I’m not particularly worried about it. That deep feeling of womb-safety is something I don’t experience anywhere else but in the great green hands of the Woods.
Woods time is special because it is making yourself at home in a place where you can’t live. Grounding yourself and elevating to a higher place. Exploring the world laying still in a hammock. In general I like bugs, but as a rule of thumb bring bug spray.
My dog just gave up the digging and is laying exhausted at the base of one of the trees I strapped the hammock to. Honey-gold sunshine is dripping through the mosaic treetops onto my bare skin and making the backs of my knees sticky with sweat. I’m remembering how blue the sky can be.
