Solitude unshackles us from the compulsion (for some, an addiction) to curate and display our lives on social media, thus allowing our interactions with ourselves, others, and the natural world to be entirely what they are in themselves, not superimposed upon an artificial narrative for which we seek validation and approval.

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.

Rootedness is a way of being in concert with the wilderness—and wildness—that sustains humans and all of life.

Kith. “Kithship” is intimacy with the landscape in which one dwells and is entangled.

Our individual charism cannot be prescribed, proscribed, or even thought up in our head. It can, however, be listened for—a rooted, ongoing, reciprocal conversation with the wild earth—a spiral of inward, receptive stillness, and outward, creative action.

the book suggests that walking barefoot on natural surfaces, even just twenty minutes a day, balances our bodies’ positive ionic charge with the earth’s predominantly negative ionic charge, helping to prevent inflammation and its attendant ailments.

The poetry of earthen life cannot reach its fullness on a computer screen, or even in the synapses of our magnificent intellect. Our hearts are formed of a wilder clay.

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.

It is in being with a particular forest that we come to understand its singularity, what it needs to flourish and thrive—and it is how, in interbeing, we ourselves come to flourish and thrive in response.