Going into to the forest on a weekly basis has proven to be extremely therapeutic for me. I know that in Japan the concept of forest bathing is quite popular and I think that if it would be to be adopted throughout the world we would have less stress and more happiness.
There are particular moments when I truly feel that my love for nature is at its peak. In the morning there is a certain mood in the forest. If there is also fog it becomes quite eerie for some while for me, I feel like the privileged observer of a magical theatrical scene. I caught in one of these days some impressing conditions that I haven’t seen in quite some time. We had some very dry and hot days and I suppose that during the week not a lot of people go into a hiking mode. This might explain the abundance of spider webs that I have noticed around the trees and plants. One night prior to my planned forest bathing there was some light rain. In the next morning when I wanted to inhale some well deserved forest love I was blown away: the whole forest looked like a spider world scene. The sun was hitting from above and the light managed to highlight the tiny masters of web development. The way the tiny threads are so perfectly made, their finesse, their fragility…it looked like a movie scene!
You see, I do quite a lot of forest bathing. And in all of these years I rarely noticed the homes that spiders make for themselves in the forest. The places they pick are usually hidden to our naked eye. They are of course predominant and everywhere yet we do not see them. In that day I could witness something unique as the conditions perfectly aligned: light, fog, spider webs.
In this kind of moments I feel humble and small. I realize that I am a speck in the entire cosmos and I am here to witness it just for a short while. I often feel that I blinked once and I reached 30 years old. I will blink two more times and most likely I will be dead. We humans tend to fool ourselves that we have time. We binge scroll, binge eat, binge entertain and binge bore ourselves feeling that the next days or years are somehow a guarantee. It is an illusion. I have no idea if I will be here tomorrow and forest bathing allows me stay grounded and remind myself that I am that small. Just like these spiders seem insignificant to us perhaps it is the same for us in the big Universe: someone from above, bigger than us, is looking and admiring our finesse, our fragility, how we are perfectly made…
While editing the photos that I managed to take in these amazing conditions I realized one thing: if the light isn’t there, you’re not going to see it. I needed the sun to be strong enough and in the right position in order to illuminate the spider webs to be so visible to my eyes. Is it the same in life? Could we reflect upon our soul as being as invisible to the eye in the absence of a special light that would make it visible? Could that light be …love? I can only wonder, ponder and think of the depths of the human spirit while feeling humbled by this forest bathing…
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