Transcendent Beauty: How the Forest Heals
John Mediatore, Ph.D.
Serious scientific studies of the mental and physical health benefits of forest bathing began in the 1980’s. The body of research is now vast and the findings are clear: time in the forest is beneficial for depression, PTSD, ADHD and ADD; it lowers blood pressure, reduces coronary artery disease, improves sleep, boosts the immune system, resets the nervous system, and improves cognitive capacity. These positive effects have all been measured and various explanations for them have been found: the high concentrations of oxygen in the forest; “phytoncides” (immunity-boosting compounds that trees produce); “biophilia” (the fact that living close to nature was normal for most of human history and is therefore good for us); “attention restoration theory” (studies showing that people focus and retain information better after spending time in nature) and more. However, other benefits of forest bathing are less measurable and harder to explain. For example, researchers at the School of Nursing at the University of San Francisco found that time in the forest is beneficial because it evokes “human feelings of ‘awe’” and “gratitude.” Some years ago when I was going through a period of grieving, I spent a lot of time hiking in the woods. I experienced several of the other benefits described above; however, I think what helped me the most were those feelings of awe and gratitude for the beauty of the forest. More than anything, they gave me the sense that life was still good. But what is it exactly about the forest that evokes awe and gratitude? For me there is a Japanese word that comes close to describing it: yūgen. As Dr. Qing Li explains, “Yūgen gives us a profound sense of the beauty and mystery of the universe. It is about this world but suggests something beyond it.” I think this is what lifted me out of that darkness – the sense of “something beyond” mysteriously suggested to me by the beauty of the woods.
This sense of mystery, the intuition of something transcendent that somehow lies beyond or behind the beauty of nature, is a feeling that many have experienced, including some of history’s greatest minds. It is exactly the subject, for instance, of William Wordsworth’s famous poem, “Ode Intimations of Immortality.” For Wordsworth, this mysterious quality is visible in a kind of radiance that illuminates the natural world. He thought this light was mostly visible to children and that, sadly, it gradually fades from our vision as we grow older.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Wordsworth imagined that this luminous way of seeing was evidence of our soul’s immortality, a residue of our existence prior to our birth when we existed in some mysterious, heavenly place: “trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home….” To be born is to forget this experience for the most part (“our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”). But we can glimpse these hints of our soul’s immortality in our memory when we recall how the world appeared to us in childhood, as “splendour in the grass, glory in the flower.” This light, now visible through the prism of memory, can still guide and encourage us:
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing….
Although adult life weighs us down with pressures, sorrows, and cares, these glimpses of our soul’s immortality are enough to sustain us and give us hope and a sense of blessing:
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction….
Wordsworth later said that the idea of the soul’s preexistence was a metaphor to explain the sense of eternity that nature gave him – a feeling that he could find no better way to describe: the joyful intimation of “something beyond.”
Other great thinkers have had similar intuitions about nature. The Greek philosopher Plato, too, believed that we could glimpse something eternal and divine in all things that are beautiful, including the natural world. In his view, all beautiful things derive their beauty from a transcendent essence or “form.” There is a reason why we refer to all beautiful things by the word “beautiful,” regardless of how superficially different they may appear, for this defining essence is what they all have in common. Indeed what makes them beautiful is actually the same thing, this transcendent form of beauty. At times Plato describes the forms as “created by God.” And so everything in the forest that is beautiful is beautiful because it is illuminated by this unchanging, eternal essence. Interestingly, unlike the other Platonic forms, which can only be apprehended through reason, this eternal, unchanging essence of beauty is actually perceptible (to those who are able to see it) in beautiful things, though it is very difficult to understand and define in words. This is another way of explaining – to the extent that this is even possible in language -- the mysterious, transcendent character of the beauty of nature, its quality of yūgen.
If Plato is arguably the most important philosopher in the Western secular tradition, St. Paul is arguably the most important thinker in the Christian one. As far apart as Paul and Plato were in religious beliefs, they agreed that the natural world gives us glimpses of a supernatural one. Paul writes, “For, since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…” (Romans 1:20) In other words, by looking at the wondrous, visible qualities of the natural world we can glimpse the existence and power of the divine. For Paul, the wonders of creation are evidence of the existence of God.
What these radically different thinkers -- the Romantic poet Wordsworth, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the Christian thinker Paul -- have in common is their intuition that the beauty of nature points to a place where the physical and the transcendent meet; to something eternal, divine, and unchanging. Regardless of one’s spiritual beliefs, it was this mysterious quality of transcendence that these writers all perceived. How it can be interpreted and explained is up to you. For me this quality is visible in the way clouds move, in the way light sparkles on streams, and in the way sunshine filters through the forest canopy. It can be heard in birdsong, in rainfall on leaves, and in the wind. More than any other benefit of spending time in the forest, it is this mysterious sense of “something beyond,” of something healing, larger than myself, and ineffably beautiful, that inspires awe and makes me feel grateful to be alive. It is a feeling that I love to share.
