In these early Autumn days Blackberries glowing purple in the soft, warm light of a low sun, I experience a strange sense of nostalgia – it happens every year and has done since my early twenties. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, fleeting memories fused with a yearning for another time, another place, maybe a realisation deep within my body-clock that winter is soon approaching, and a mourning for those halcyon days of summers past.
Equinox is a time of change, of weather fronts – zones of transition, turbulence and borderlines, places of instability and fluctuation, merging and separating – a time when the warm earth cools and the sea becomes warmer than the land.
It is also at this time of year that I feel a deep call to migration and peregrinations of various kinds, maybe heading south to eke out the last few rays of sunshine, alongside an instinctual drive to harvest, and prepare the nest for the coming darkness, and the Celtic New Year at Samhain.
Nostalgia means a longing to return home, but how do we define home in a time of so much transition, transmigration, and global communication – of refugees, survivors, people displaced by war, drought, famine, political persecution, economic factors and religious, racial or sexual persecution. Where is home right now and how do we define our place to be?
When I was younger I had an old hardback book of black and white photos from the turn of the 20th Century. I was really struck by a portrait shot of a man who lived in the Meon Valley in Hampshire at that time. This is a place where I also lived for a while working on a Nature reserve close to Selbourne where Gilbert White wrote the Classic Natural History volume ‘The Natural History of Selbourne’. It is a valley steeped in traditional farming and land use and villages that arose from ancient settlements. The most striking aspect of this photo was the man’s facial characteristics. His face radiated a wildness with such strong features and deep eyes, and yet also a soft, calm expression within those weathered lines. The caption underneath described him as a descendent of the original tribe that had sailed up the estuary and settled this valley. In other words his family, his bloodline had lived in that valley for at least 2-3000 years. That photo was taken just over 100 years ago, and its remarkable how much has changed since then. How many of us can claim to still be living where we were born, or raised, or how many generations have been present in this place we call home.
I am a second-generation refugee and finding my home, my roots has been a lifelong pursuit. Living in Devon close to the moors and the sea serves to anchor me to the land here, gravity draws me towards the bedrock of all existence here. In the woods and valleys and remote places I feel home, nowhere more so than the blessed River Dart. I posit the idea that the soul can find home in such wild places, that a part of us can dwell there without recourse to comforts or material effects. The soul just abides, it stays somewhere for a while and experiences the energy of that place, so that when we physically go there we feel this uplift, this sense of healing and completeness, or ‘coming home’.
In forest bathing we like to think of the forest as our ultimate home, the origin of our species and the environment that forged our physical shape and our physiological and psychological functioning. It is where we built our first rudimentary homes or nests. One of our closely related arboreal cousins the Orangutan builds both day nests and night nests. The nest building practical skills are a tradition passed down from Mums to their offspring who stay with them for up to 7 yrs.
Supporting our participants to find home, to sit on the earth and breathe in and out naturally, to nestle into the embrace of a tree buttress is such a powerful archaic activity that can bring about a calming effect. One of my colleagues Dr. Ronen Berger developed a programme called ‘making a home in Nature’ to support individuals with trauma in a Nature therapy context. Our Den building as children also taps into this primal urge to create shelter and safety, to hide from the elements and consolidate our positions.
Can you incorporate some home or nest building activity into your practice this autumn?
