Forest bathing: Stress-free among the old hemlocks

In Mike Tidwell’s new book, “The Trees of Willow Avenue,” he tells of walking one day from a suburban Maryland parking lot into a forest. He and his companion walked for a while, then gazed up silently at the mature oaks, beeches and pines that surrounded them.

“We began to feel the stress of the morning Beltway traffic and other cares falling away,” Tidwell writes. “Had we been hooked up to monitoring equipment, we would have watched our cortisol levels, our stress hormones, steadily fall at the same time our heart rates dropped. We were internalizing the stillness of the trees. The feeling was wonderful.”

The Japanese call it shinrinyoku, soaking up the forest atmosphere, forest bathing.

After writing my review of Mike’s book for Substack, I went out for such a bath on the first day of spring, and ended up among giant hemlocks, some thriving in their old age, others in eternal rest and cloaked in thick moss. I was alone with the trees and felt what Tidwell felt. As soon as I stepped on the trail, I could sense the soothing power of the hemlocks, their cool comfort, and I didn’t give the noisy world another thought the whole time I was in that solemn place.

I took some photographs, accepting the impossibility of capturing the consoling atmosphere of the hemlock grove with a cellphone camera. But I offer them anyway, just to give you an idea of what it was like — and to suggest that a forest bath might do you some good, too.

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