“The Forest is the Therapist.” On the Art of Noticing

Near the summit of Volcan Mountain, Janice Bina-Smith sits with a group of us in a circle on crunching oak leaves. The red ants don’t seem to be in a biting mood. Patches of sky above are clear. Gusts of wind move the trees, wagging their tips.

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“The forest is the therapist,” she says, “not me. I’m the guide. Your guide only opens the door.” What we will experience is nothing like hiking, she adds. “When people are hiking, they’re usually eager to reach a destination. They don’t fully experience what they see. Forest bathing is a way to slow down, step out of our bodies. Stopping to notice everything.”

Janice picks up a piece of bark, rolls it in her fingers, and smiles. “It does help to remember what you noticed as a child.” A musician and nature educator, Janice (who told the tale of the mountain lion on her roof) is in her final stage of becoming a forest therapy guide. In a few weeks, she will be accredited by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs. She hopes to make nature therapy her semiretirement vocation.

Forest bathing, also known as shinrin-yoku, originated in 1982 when Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries observed that office workers felt better when they were outdoors in a natural environment. Consequently, the department started recommending nature immersion to its employees. Researchers found that after employees spent time in forests, their blood pressure decreased; their number of killer cells, a type of white blood cell that attacks tumors or cells infected with a virus, increased; and their immune system became stronger.

A storm of noticing. I love that phrase.

International research followed. In 2019, Ye Wen of Jiangxi Agricultural University in China coauthored a review of papers assessing the health benefits of forest bathing. The study found these potential benefits: “remarkably improving cardiovascular function, hemodynamic indexes, neuroendocrine indexes, metabolic indexes, immunity and inflammatory indexes, antioxidant indexes, and electrophysiological indexes; significantly enhancing people’s emotional state, attitude, and feelings towards things, physical and psychological recovery, and adaptive behaviors; and obvious alleviation of anxiety and depression.”

Why so many benefits? Researchers offered one explanation: Some tree species emit phytoncides—antimicrobial organic compounds that serve as insecticides. (The word phytoncide, coined in 1928 by Boris P. Tokin, a Russian biochemist, means “exterminated by the plant.”) Trees bathe themselves in these chemicals. And we get the benefit of phytoncides when we walk through trees, especially conifers.

Today, shinrin-yoku is one of several emerging therapies that utilize nature immersion. These include equine therapy, wilderness and adventure therapy, and other applications that fall under the still-evolving umbrella of ecopsychology. In Japan, trained forest bathing guides often incorporate yoga and meditation into their forest bathing practices. Janice, however, takes a more straightforward approach.

Standing up, she offers what she calls her first invitation. She asks us to taste a pine needle, close our eyes, and listen to the wind, the shifting leaves, an insistent bird nearby, and other birds farther away. “Does the bird’s song have a rhythm to it? Can you hear a rhythm in the wind?” she asks. “Put your hand on your heart, feel it beating. Now, with your eyes closed, sit in the direction your body will want to sit in, and be still and listen.”

I mainly hear my breathing.

After a few moments, she says, “Now open your eyes as if you are seeing nature for the first time, like a baby. What do you see? What do you notice?”

One woman, a healthcare worker, can still taste the pine needles she has placed in her mouth just minutes before. Another woman, an artist, describes the feeling of being a very young child, riding in a shopping cart with her mother pushing, and enjoying all the new sights until becoming overwhelmed by what she calls a “storm of noticing.” She smiles. “And then I dissolved into a crying fit, like an overstimulated baby.”

A storm of noticing. I love that phrase.

Down the slope, a car pulls in under the trees. A man and a woman get out. They’re talking loudly.

Now it is my turn to report. I tell how I noticed a slate-colored flat rock surrounded by leaves. Staring at it, I was transported to my grandmother’s rough yard. In that memory, a fermenting pear lay on the ground next to the trunk. My legs were stretched out in front of me. I saw the leather and metal leg braces I often wore when I was four years old. I turned to watch my father in his army coat as he stamped out a little fire in the grass. Then, my gaze returned to the single Volcan rock.

Janice offers the following invitation: to befriend a tree.

After a while, the man and woman leave.

As if on cue, a member of our forest bathing group reports that she can no longer hear as well as she used to. But in the forest, she can feel the air moving across her eardrums. “What I notice mostly is that I’d like to be hearing more.”

“I had to work to let go of the visitors and their talking,” says Janice. “When they drove away, I noticed how everything became louder. I can see the sunlight coming through my eyelids.” Opening her eyes, she saw “these big tree beings. They have been here so long, lived through so much.” The outer bark of the largest tree is burned to charcoal.

For her next invitation, Janice asks us to head out into the woods and “notice what’s moving. Tell us what you find.” Looking down to a few feet from the ground, I notice the bowl of an oak trunk—a hollowed-out place filled with water. The air moves little rivulets across its black surface. Ants parade along the water’s edge. I look up—a contrail from a jet extends slowly across the blue between the branches. Walking now, I see shadows moving on the ground, their edges quivering. I have never seen the fingers of shadows moving until now, at least not consciously. Each shadow seems to have its own personality.

I’m surprised by how quickly I’m getting into this.

Ahead, I encounter a self-healing oak. Its outer bark is mainly charcoal, but the next layer is yellow or cream, rough and light like balsa wood. On that tree, the live outer bark is already wrapping around the scars, rolling over at the edges. Look at it long enough, and you can almost see the rounded edges slowly covering the wound. Only recently have I noticed this healing phenomenon, as if the tree’s inner hand is wrapping around the wound.

A few weeks ago, I was walking in our neighborhood with some visitors. One of them was Gary Knell, who had just retired as CEO of the National Geographic Society. Appropriately, he was the first to notice this phenomenon in a tree that I had walked past many times and had not seen. About fifteen feet up the trunk of this tree, thick new bark was rolling around a deep wound—either a fire or saw wound. The thick skin of the tree was enveloping the wound, making the perfect shape of a valentine heart. But that was then. Back to the moment.

Passing another black-and-bronze stump, I notice how the shards of its bark reach up like flames. Wild strawberry leaves bounce in the breeze. Poison oak, with similarly shaped leaves, is moving in around the strawberry plants.

I come to a long depression of land with a little creek rushing through it—but this is another illusion. A closer look, and the water turns out to be a type of wild grass flowing downward in clumps with long, pointed blades. Perhaps a recent storm sent a little flood down this mountainside and shaped the grasses and soil in its image. As with the shadows, the wind moves each blade of grass, and the blades join in green currents.

In the distance, Janice plays a few notes on her ocarina, a kind of flute. This is her call to reassemble.

We again sit in the grass in a circle and report the movements we have just seen or felt. The youngest member of the group, a physical therapist, discusses how her sense of scale changed when she began examining the smallest moving things.

Janice offers the following invitation: to befriend a tree. We fan out. I head to the fallen hulk of a giant pine. I have seen it here before and have thought, “What a shame that it was cut down.” Inside the trunk, which is perhaps five feet in diameter, is darkness, a cave, and a tunnel that once led to the sky through the dead trunk’s center. Next to it, the stump is filled with sawdust and spiked with holes. On the ground between the stump and the fallen tree, purple mushrooms seem to pull inward, desiccated and withdrawn.

A few feet away, a circle of wood spines marks where a larger tree died long ago. Out of this ring of spines evenly spaced, every foot or so, a young tree grows out of the tree that had been. A circle of forest, rising from the carcass of the elder; an outer world emerging from the inner. I find some- thing comforting about this moment. In the distance, a red-tailed hawk cries.

I feel a sudden wave of peace, and something else: compassion.

A few minutes later, gathered by the ocarina, someone points to a tree, high on the mountainside. Its peculiar formation of dead branches is shaped like an eagle’s nest. The eleven-year-old in me wonders what it would be like to climb that tree and sit in the palm of reaching fingers.

“At some point, this is all too much,” says the artist. “Overwhelming. I need a Coke.”

The physical therapist speaks next. I lean forward to hear her soft voice: “See that tree over there, the big one that fell but was caught in the branches of other trees? I felt that something terrible had happened there. I sat down in front of it and asked it to tell me a story. It said, ‘Others fell, but not all survived. Some of us find a way to survive.’” She pauses. The group is quiet. I wonder, as perhaps you would, what happened to her long ago and how she survived.

“I see these trees of different sizes,” says Janice, “growing up together, almost embracing, holding on, and yet still individuals. Holding on to each other.” She describes a favorite tree, one she has visited in this grove before. A very old tree also scarred black, the outer bark split open, the inner bark pink. The smaller pines behind it stand healthy, unburned.

What also surprised me was how the stories—our descriptions of what we saw, heard, and felt—often sounded like parables or folklore.

Janice says the elder tree probably served as a fire barrier, protecting the smaller trees from the flames.

“It made me think,” she says, “we all get scared, but we can run. These trees can’t. They stand and take it.” Then she adds, “Sitting under that tree, I thought about getting older, how my hair is turning silver.” She smiles when she says this. It is not a bad feeling, getting older.

Others also report what they saw, heard, or sensed: a broken white egg shell, large enough to be the egg of an eagle. A black ant carrying a piece of white fluff, followed by a half dozen ants that seem unburdened by any load. On a flat boulder, the remains of a mouse—its vertebrae here, its brain case over there, and most of its tiny bones clustered in one spot, surrounded by a ring of old, wet, dissolving fur, perhaps what was once an owl pellet. A feather, a leaf, each a potential carrier of seeds over a field or across miles.

One of the women paraphrases a quote she heard the other day: “If you want to get anywhere in life, you need to learn to fly.”

Two elements of our conversations were particularly striking. One was the tendency to turn solid objects into subjects of wonder. In my case, the stump with spires that seemed to become fire, and the wild grass, flattened by wind, that I mistook for flowing water.

What I didn’t see were faces. Pareidolia is the tendency to see faces in various objects, including elements of nature—the bark of trees, clouds, or, for that matter, a cheese sandwich. In 2004, such a sandwich, reportedly marked with the image of the Virgin Mary, sold for $28,000 on eBay. The sandwich was ten years old. I’m a pareidoliast (if that’s not a word, it should be), as I can’t pass a tree or see a cloud without that tree or cloud seeming to look back at me.

What also surprised me was how the stories—our descriptions of what we saw, heard, and felt—often sounded like parables or folklore. The child who dissolved into the storm of noticing. The “big tree beings” that had been here so long. The ants that were both leaders and followers. The urge to climb a tree and sit in the palm of its reaching fingers. The outer tree cared for by the inner tree, like a gentle nurse. And the circle of new forest rising from decay.

I wondered, Where do fairy tales come from? Or religious visions? Is the forest enchanted? Or have we suspended our disbelief, dismissed the pretense that we know all the answers? That’s one way to describe awe.

The final ocarina notes drift through the trees. We gather for a picnic. Janice pours cups of tea she has brewed from pine needles and chickweed. She hands us the cups and pours the tea from one cup into the leaves and needles on the ground. She says, “We always give the earth the first cup.”

Some of us resist such rituals. Still, the feeling of peace and compassion that filled me near the circle of new trees—that feeling was growing. It would last into the next day. The phytoncides had done their job.

I suspect the others felt this, too.

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From Noticing: Intimate Encounters with the Natural World. Courtesy of Algonquin Books / Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. Copyright (c) 2026 by Richard Louv.