Wonder and enchantment require us to disengage from culturally constructed norms of rationality for adult humans and allow ourselves to be affected by the astonishing world that enfolds us always.

I discovered this visionary definition in a Benedictine monastery library some years ago: Hope is “that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future,” and a quality that gives our actions “special urgency.”

Dr. Simard suggests several things we human animals can do to assist trees in their lives and forest-making, the most significant being to simply spend time among them.

“The individual is the meeting place of the four elements,” writes John O’Donohue of the ancient Celtic perspective.

It is a law of physics that all matter is conserved—our bodies return, return, return. This is the message of ecologists, and of mystics—that each life is radically connected to all of life, always, with nothing so small that it can be lost.

When I am not writing outdoors, I sit at a desk piled with stones, shells, plants, fir cones, and the fragrance of cedar essential oil wafting in the air. Yet there is a slippery slope where easily accessed “nature-derived stimuli,” can come to replace our necessary attentiveness to living nature.

Return, and be claimed. Choose a tree to sit with. This practice intertwines with the “still spot” of animal relating. Visit this tree every day for a season, a year, a life.

wild hearts breed love and protection of a wild earth.

In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes of her suspicion that “the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.” Wandering brings mind and movement into a healing congruity.