Finding a Forest Mentor
In October 2021, I participated in a workshop for people of color that taught us how to lead outdoor experiences that integrate skills drawn from the practice of forest bathing. For a month, the “Forest as Nourishment” course prompted me to wake up early on Saturday mornings and spend the day in an ancient forest, listening to the rain and the river, noticing the changing leaves, observing all the mushrooms and moss and spiders and ferns living in and on the trees.
If you haven’t had the good fortune to experience forest bathing firsthand, the practice is often facilitated by a guide who offers invitations to help connect participants to their senses and surroundings. Many of these have delightful names that clearly describe the intent of the invitation: The Joy of Tiny Things. Embrace the Wind. Mud Squish. The one that inspired me to combine writing with forest bathing, though, is Achieve Nothing. In Your Guide to Forest Bathing, M. Amos Clifford describes the invitation this way: “Allow yourself no goals, nothing to do, nothing to reach. Don’t even try to achieve not-achieving. Don’t try to not do; just not do. Notice what you are noticing.” When I practice Achieve Nothing, I often end up horizontal, staring up at the rivers of sky created by crown shyness, wonderfully content. I usually have no desire to capture the moment in writing, to jot down the thoughts drifting through me, to get back to the Big Important Poem that felt so urgent only hours ago. I feel aimless in the best possible way, and whenever I do come back to writing, I tend to be more at ease with whatever I create, no matter how messy, unpolished, drafty, or incomplete it inevitably is. After many years of writing toward achievements of various sorts—degrees and publications and jobs and grants and a nebulous desire to be found worthy—writing with no goal and nothing to reach toward has helped me rediscover the joy of being receptive to whatever shows up on the page, even if what shows up is nothing.
Perhaps it’s this Achieve Nothing mindset that’s helped me be more open to combining forest bathing practices with writing, and to accepting whatever results from doing so. One invitation that I have used in my writing and introduced in recent classes is Find a Forest Mentor, which consists of letting your body pull you toward a being—a stone, an animal, a plant, a pool of water—and then introducing yourself, having a conversation, and writing down what the being shares with you. Every time I offer this invitation, I’m afraid that someone is going to call me crazy, to say that there’s no way they’re going to talk to a rock or a fern or a mud puddle. But every time, each person wanders off, guided by their inner radar, and returns later with brilliant guidance shared by a shadow-laced tree limb, a clan of twigs, a mole hole.
Recently, when I offered the invitation during a class, I stayed behind in a clearing in a spruce forest while the participants ambled toward their respective mentors. The stump that had been in front of me for the last two hours suddenly had my full attention. Someone had placed a quarter at the center of its rings—a strange offering—and when I leaned in to touch the smooth plane left by a saw, the stump spoke to me in a voice I can only describe as sassy. Here’s an excerpt of the gentle chiding I received:
Perhaps you think of me as gone, as partial, as cut down, hacked to bits, done forever. Perhaps you imagine mostly my absence, what is missing, how I am less than all the tall green wonders swaying around me. But if you touch where I have been torn, I am still sticky with sap, still pulling rain up through my roots, still full of sharp scent. I am still home to soft moss, to lichen, to this spider threading its gossamer on me and to the ant about to enter that trap. I am still as long for this world as you are—longer, in fact—and I don’t mean that to be harsh, only to say: What are you waiting for? What do you want to draw up from the earth and bead on your surface? Who do you want to be a home to?
Maybe the voice I heard was the stump speaking to me. Maybe it was a part of myself that had been shuttered away and felt safe to come out in the presence of that venerable spruce. Even if the latter is the case, isn’t that what any good mentor does—not just give you advice and guidance but also help you discern and value your own wisdom? As I go back to my writing goals, my efforts, my desires to achieve something—which haven’t magically disappeared—I’ll carry the spruce’s questions with me, asking myself again and again not only what I want to make but also who I hope will find shelter in what I create.
Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of four books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Read more.