Reconnecting With Nature in the Heart of D.C.
Forest Bathing Offers A Respite From the Stress of Life in the Nation’s Capital
In the current news environment, it often feels like we live the events of a month in just one day. The quotidian challenges of work and personal lives are punctuated with tweets and breaking news alerts that seem to amplify our national discord. There’s widespread uncertainty about who will be safe from deportation and who will have access to health care. In Washington, D.C., in particular, it can be hard to find refuge from the anxiety of life at the center of so much political melodrama.
This anxiety is not insignificant. In November, the American Psychological Association released its annual report on national stress levels, which found that 63 percent of Americans experience “significant stress about the future of our nation.” This stress — like stress about money and work — can manifest as fatigue, anger, sleeplessness and anxiety. As the tumult of our politics shows no sign of settling in 2018, those of us who live in the District are in need of some serious stress relief.
Clare Kelley offers one such antidote through DC Forest Bathing, which leads guided forest therapy walks through local parks. Forest bathing is a direct translation of the Japanese “shinrin-yoku,” a form of nature therapy developed by the Japanese Forest Agency in 1982. The practice includes guided walks and simple activities — called invitations — conducted in a natural environment. The goal is to ease the physical effects of stress, including a weakened immune system and high blood pressure.
Unlike yoga, another Eastern practice that many Westerners turn to for stress relief, forest bathing is rooted in government-funded research. Concerns about the rise of “karoshi” — which means “death from overwork” — as well as high rates of suicide and an increasingly urban population led Japanese researchers back to the connection with nature that has been prominent throughout their country’s culture and history. In The Nature Fix, Florence Williams writes of forest bathing, “It’s not about wilderness; it’s about the nature/civilization hybrid the Japanese have cultivated for thousands of years.”
With its abundance of public parks and stretches of forests, D.C. is an ideal place to try to bridge the gap between the stress of city life and the expansiveness of nature. Kelley’s favorite park is Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy in Northwest, where, on a Sunday in February, I joined her and 13 other participants for a guided forest therapy walk. She asked each of us to introduce ourselves and say in three words why we were there. “Too much stress,” one participant said.
The afternoon began with a short walk down the trail. Bright sunlight bathed the surrounding hillsides of Rock Creek Park, which still held pockets of snow from the previous day’s storm. The sycamore trees shone like X-rays against the brilliantly blue winter sky. As we walked, Kelley encouraged us to marvel at the snowdrop flowers that had just bloomed or feel the bark of the trees that lined the trail. This was an amble more than a hike; the destination was unimportant. During the two hours we were in the woods, we only walked about a quarter of a mile.
Through a series of invitations, Kelley gently encouraged us to put aside the intensity of our city lives. I laughed to myself when I realized she was guiding me back to the exploration that had been so natural for me as a child. Growing up, I’d often run into the woods that lined my childhood backyard to follow squirrels down fallen logs and crouch by the creek to catch crayfish. Now in my late twenties, I’d had to schedule time to remember how to observe and connect with nature the way I’d instinctively done as a child, the way humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years.
Kelley eased the group into that process of remembering. We sat on the thawing earth and turned lethargically north, east, south, west, closing our eyes to feel how the sun warmed our bodies differently at each turn. Without the distractions of deadlines or technology, we were encouraged to explore our surroundings with a childlike curiosity. We delighted when a barred owl hooted from a hilltop. We tossed pebbles in the creek just to see how it’d sound. We sat in a circle and passed around a spicebush twig, each of us scratching it to smell its fragrance before sharing an observation or feeling with the group: the sight of a dog romping in the creek or the wonder of spotting the first spring leaf on a tree.
Kelly Brown is an elementary school teacher who tries to join a forest therapy walk once a month. Brown’s first forest therapy walk was a one-on-one with Kelley, but after five months of group walks, he said, “The social aspect is what’s totally grown. Because to do it with other people is a lot of fun.”
This sense of community is an essential component of forest bathing. “We like to say that nature connection is culture repair,” Kelley told me. “By coming out together and experiencing these invitations, these guided gentle activities, the sense of the other species … it reminds us of a lot of our own nature and what that means to be with each other in a very peaceful and belonging way.”
The walk ended with a tea ceremony in a creekside meadow. Kelley filled jars of homebrewed Russian sage tea and mulled apple cider, and participants shared nuts, cookies and mandarins. One last time, we passed around a stick and shared our reflections from the day. Many participants commented on the pleasure of being in community and the calm they experienced by retreating from the hustle and bustle of D.C. life.
I asked Ana Ka’ahanui, who works full-time at the U.S. Green Building Council and runs an environmental nonprofit on the side, how she felt after the walk. “Oh, extremely chill, zen, joyous,” she said.
Ka’ahanui sought out forest bathing as a way to explore nature, learn from a guide, and supplement her treatment for high blood pressure. “I definitely feel the health benefits,” she said.
Brown agreed. “This is my therapy,” he said. “It’s helped with my anxiety, personally. And depression, too.”
As the afternoon came to a close, participants drifted dreamily back to their lives. I stuck to the trails as long as I could and eventually came up out of Rock Creek Park on Q Street. My body hummed with a deep sense of calm — a rootedness — as I re-entered city life. At the crosswalk to Massachusetts Avenue, a flash of yellow caught my eye. It was a hand-written sticker pasted onto a streetlight. “Donald’s breath smells like Ivanka’s pussy,” it read. I sighed. There it is was again: The weight of hosting scandal, vulgarity and prejudice; the injustice of our city’s lack of political power to resist an agenda it overwhelmingly opposes.
But for all the vitriol that this city can hold, I’d seen that afternoon that it contains an equal — if not greater — measure of resilience, empathy and community. Kelley showed us how simple it is to reconnect to that aspect of our human nature. The challenge is to remember that we can make that connection.
