Outside Ourselves
From the clinicians at Forest Ferns Counseling. Written in the first person by a member of our clinical team.
Why is it so hard sometimes to do things we know we will enjoy and that will make us feel better? Spending time outside in nature, for example. I’m convinced that everyone, myself included, would be way happier and healthier if we just spent more time with trees. But how often do I actually drive over to the nature preserve near my house and take a walk? Once or twice a month if I’m lucky.
No judgment. We’re all working so hard. Our lives are too demanding to allow all the outdoor meandering that our souls and bodies seem to need. Our society is rigged to make it almost impossible to get ahead financially. Our air is polluted. We’re stressed about gas prices, war, the erosion of civil liberties, and (ironically) climate collapse.
It’s that last point that’s getting to me right now. The Guardian recently published a piece on how we need new rituals and a vocabulary to talk about our grief over the loss of habitats and species. We need a way to come to terms with this new reality. The article mentions a memorial gathering held in Iceland to mourn the country’s first glacier lost to climate change. That kind of ritual is exactly what we need right now.
Our world is changing, but if you step outside in the morning, nature is still there. We can mourn what’s lost and hang on tightly to what we have. A number of books over the years have helped me think about what nature means in the lives of human beings. The OG classic Walden is one. Written in the 1850s, it’s a lyrical account of observing nature’s cycles up close. It’s worth reading if you never have. Thoreau was far from perfect, but he had some beautiful insights about how we can learn how to live simply and deliberately from nature. “Heaven is under our feet,” he wrote.
Another book is Katherine May’s Wintering, which was particularly helpful to me during the Covid lockdowns. It gave me a new appreciation for the cold and prompted me to take neighborhood walks in February in my ankle-length puffer coat. It’s kind of amazing how nice it is to walk outside in winter if you’re willing to wear what is essentially a sleeping bag. (I’m writing this in summer when winter seems distant and exotic.) Both books, in different ways, helped me see that paying attention to nature can change how we live.
I read another book, Something in the Woods Loves You, recently and it’s really sticking with me. Written by poet Jarod K. Anderson, it’s a sweet, heartfelt memoir about Anderson’s depression and suicidal ideation, which he worked through using psychotherapy and time spent in nature. The book is organized around his poetic observations of bats, mushrooms, a blue heron, a squirrel, and various other creatures, from whom he learned that the natural world is not organized around human concerns but humans can also find real belonging there. That paradox was healing for him.
That paradox is also at the heart of the ethno-anthropological book How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn looks at how Indigenous communities in the Amazon understand forests as living worlds where plants, animals, humans, and spirits interact. He writes that having encounters with beings who are radically not us allows us to enter into intimate relationships with beings who do not communicate using our symbolic systems. The natural world presents something essentially “beyond my mind, beyond convention, beyond the human,” writes Kohn.
It’s the same paradox that Anderson was talking about: the natural world as both Other and Home. In 2026, we’re still living out the legacy of a Western tradition that viewed nature as something separate from us, to be studied and observed from a distance. When we’re actually outside, we intuitively sense that idea to be false. We feel our ancestral connection to the earth. The personas and problems we usually walk around with disappear, or at least feel lighter.
For people from marginalized backgrounds, especially, nature can be a respite from a social world organized around false hierarchies of value. Time outdoors is a chance to become immersed in restorative, nonhuman relationships. If human relationships have been harmful, stepping away from them can feel like a huge relief. In his memoir Birding While Black, Christian Cooper writes that “the myopia that lets us see only our own roles falls away for a little while. Suddenly, we can breathe again.”
Trees and wild birds don’t care about our histories or our identities, and their indifference can be freedom. Outside of our climate-controlled indoor spaces, we don’t have to judge our worth and wonder if we’re coming up short. But nature is also so much more than just a setting for human redemption. More and more, as the ecologies around us fade or fail, we owe it to nature to remember its worth.
Clinically reviewed by Mel Whalen, PhD, LP — Licensed Psychologist, Michigan #6301015759.
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