Chapter Thirty-Seven: Evergreen

Are forests magic or is it all in my mind? Judge for yourself.

I am going to start today’s installment with a warning: if you have no tolerance for esoteric subjects or have never projected yourself inside the gatefold of a mid-career Led Zeppelin album, this might not be the chapter for you.

Those of you who have read along so far may recall that I am an out and proud tree hugger. Either in a contemplative or searching mode, or propelled by a bout of depression or prolonged discontent; when traveling and feeling uprooted, or just seeking to mark a new life passage, I have long had the habit to venture into a park or forest, sidle up to a tree that seems interesting, press my back up against it, and see what happens.

I do not care that recent studies have debunked the theory of trees having thought networks among themselves. All I can speak for is my own experience, which is tree-to-human. Once you make contact, a tree will almost always give you something that feels like a strong wave, or a (mostly-non-physical) hug-plus.

No matter how much any of this is scientifically factual, it is a low stakes bonding moment tailor made for introverts, or anyone who lives in fear of the chaos of human intimacy. (Nice to meet you.) Even we need to get hugs sometimes. So far no tree has ever made fun of me or been freaked out by me showing up needing a little reinforcement. I will always believe that nature in general is more generous than the humans who make up a small part of it.

Since the whole experience of bonding with a tree is fairly profound, you want to make sure you find the right one. In the moment of selection, sometimes I feel like I’m cruising them. “Hey, lady…” It’s a saucy metaphor and it’s not far off. A shaman I occasionally consult has advised me to seek consent before tree-bonding. According to him, trees have consciences and free will and we can’t just blunder up and energetically slobber all over them without their OK. He told me to ask and see what comes back. Even better, upon entering the border of the forest where my potential future tree friend lives, I could ask the whole forest beforehand, and even pluck a hair from my head and drop it there, to give something of me back.

That seems only fair, though I forget to do the hair thing all the time.

Ninety-nine percent of the time when you ask to hang out with a tree it’s a yes. When it’s a no, it’s unmistakable. You can feel it telling you to talk to its hand. (Its branch? Sorry.) You have to be relatively calm to feel it at first.

The more you hang out with trees in this way, you see that each one has a distinct personality. I have snuggled with angry trees before, and with confusing ones. Mostly they are kind. Sometimes I suspect a particular feeling I’m getting is the tree mirroring me back to me. Not that I think a tree can just switch up its particular personality—maybe it can. More like, I probably chose that particular tree that day because it was a match.

Whatever the mechanism, whatever the reason, trees are like ideal mothers. They don’t judge you, they contain you.

Sometimes I ask a tree if there’s anything it wants me to know. This is a pretty grand notion on my part, as if trees actually gave a shit about trivial human problems, and if so, one might then venture to give a total stranger advice. But occasionally something does surface. It’s usually pretty basic, and very nice: the world loves you, I love you, that sort of thing. Half of it could just be me talking to myself, but that’s fine too. The most important thing about messages like those is to believe them.

All of that said, now that I had settled into living within short range of literally millions of trees, each with something unique to offer, I realized it had been a while since I had gone out into the forest looking to hang out with one. When friends came to visit, we’d usually go out for a long walk, but that was a different exchange. We’d be chatting amongst ourselves. After Terrence passed, Charles needed a forest walk like no one I have ever seen. It was obvious. That one was very quiet.

But when it was just me, I was more often not bothering to go out at all. That would mean disconnecting from the internet-powered info-stream of my office and changing from pajama bottoms into something slightly more structured. This sounds sad but it was also a sign that I was finally settling into habits and work and maybe not needing quite that much grounding. In its own way, that was a blessing.

By then I had been thinking of turning this whole adventure you’ve been reading into a book pitch. I did in fact do that. The story as we pitched it wasn’t focused enough on the basic “magic of the French countryside” bullshit to be commercial enough for American publishers. I plead guilty. This is a true story, after all.

Anyway, in late February, 2021, as I was working on that proposal, I thought I should dive down into the mystery of where I was living in a more journalistic way. So I sought out someone who could take me on a forest bath.

Le Perche is not awash in yoga studios. The locals, still by far in the majority compared to Parisian weekenders and transplants, have made a living off of animal husbandry and dairy farming and forestry since long before Carl Jung made it sexy for alienated white people from the city to flock to nature to find themselves. You might find a few pastel colored flyers next to the cash register at a hotel restaurant to let you know somebody out there was thinking about chakras, but mostly you had to sniff that stuff out.

I found Laurent online. He was a sylvotherapist whose company name was a terrible Franglais pun on the idea of well-being and trees and offered group walks that cost €40 for two hours. I’d spend that much eating lunch at one of the local mediocre restaurants. I was in.

It was one of those strange foggy days where occasional flashes of sun would pierce the enveloping silver and everything would glow. It might not have been ideal weather for a mindless stroll but if you were looking for something mysterious or magic to happen you couldn’t have asked for better.

We met up at the center of a gorgeous village about twenty minutes to the south of mine. Laurent turned out to be young and quite handsome—mid-30s, tall, dark-haired, angular, dimples. “It looks like it’s just going to be you and me,” he said. “I guess the weather scared off the other two people who were coming.” Thank God, I thought. Laurent wore a wedding ring—sorry, American publishers, it wasn’t like that. But my explicitly woo woo forest perambulations are usually done far from the eyes of others so I was glad it would just be us two confirmed believers.

At the border to the forest, Laurent got out a Tibetan singing bowl. (Of course he did, guys. Get into it.) He rang it and asked me to try to identify the moment the sound stopped. The vibration hung in the air forever before the chirping of the birds started to crowd it out. Laurent told me to mush my hands in the mulchy ground and smell it. He handed me some edible grass to nibble. His whole technique was to get me to slow down and lean on a different sense each time. We finally entered the forest proper, on a very small trail. It was hilly, filled with Canadian oak and all kinds of conifers, and dead quiet.

This picture is not of that forest. These are all just random pics of my own. Forests are strangely hard to take phone camera pictures with.

He stopped us and said we were going to do an exercise where we tried to walk as slowly as humanly possible. “Try to move only a fraction of a centimeter with each breath,” he said. We must have looked like idiots but only the trees were watching, and as we’ve already established, they’re cool.

Soon Laurent told me to close my eyes and keep walking. Not to worry, he’d guide me. He didn’t take my hand, he just led the way a few feet ahead and called out to warn me if an obstacle was coming up. “Keep going keep going. Now move two footsteps to the right,” he’d say. “Slow down and duck. No, a little more.” That went on for what felt like half an hour.

Finally he said, OK, open your eyes, and thus was revealed the most beautiful grove I had ever seen. The hills were steeper than before so it was like being in a magic bowl covered in bright green moss, which popped surreally in the misty air. The trees were vast, and spaced out enough from each other as if each were standing by itself, though in groups their tops blotted out some of the milky grey sky. I told Laurent this might be a good moment to go hang out one on one with a one of the trees and he agreed, cautioning me to ask permission first. Obviously, Laurent! I was not Gooped yesterday.

I spent a good ten minutes in mutual love bombing and then it was time for us to leave. I felt different in my skin as I walked back to my car. Slightly tingly, maybe? Definitely a light headed, and perhaps heavier-limbed. Before I pulled away from the parking area to head back home, I needed a few minutes to twist myself back into normal for the drive.

It was just starting to get dark as I wound through a different part of the forest that contained the departmental road. I was marinating in loose thoughts about the transformative power of nature. How somehow all this must have some larger, more salutary effect on me, even if I had yet to feel identify it. Perhaps this might open up some newfound creativity or create some deeper level of calm. And then out of the corner of my eye something moved, and I almost hit a deer.

Take from all of this what you will, but promise me that no matter what, you will always drive carefully.