The day begins with an autumn mist which soon burns off to reveal a sparkling blue sky. It’s impossibly blue and with the cool clarity that has been absent since spring. There’s a gentle feel, slightly melancholic and beautiful; and the world at this moment feels still. My mood follows the atmosphere of the land: from the vagueness of the misty start to feeling suddenly awake and bright with a lucidity of mind matching the diamond clarity of the sky. 

I arrive at the edge of the Chiltern woods where I’m walking today. As I enter the ancient beech woods, I breathe in the rich humus elixir of the forest floor full of health giving phytochemicals. Now I’m immersed in the cooler, dappled light of the forest.

I crunch on the thick carpet of beech mast underfoot, plentiful after a good season along with a huge crop of acorns from the oaks interspersed among the more numerous beech trees. Tensions melt in my body that I didn’t even realise I was carrying. And now I’m fully in the forest, gazing around, listening, feeling, inhaling. Walking with no goal, just wandering through the trees

The mother trees are ancient pollarded beech trees, many over 500 years old and full of experience and memories. The woodland has probably been here since the last Ice Age, so this forest really has character and soul. 

In past centuries, people harvested wood from these trees and grazed cattle underneath, creating a more open wood pasture landscape rather than a very dense canopy. This is similar to how in prehistoric times, giant herbivores would have provided the same function in the woods.

I soon find myself happily lost among the branching forest paths and this serves to really awaken my senses. I walk aimlessly, taking less trodden animal trails. The early autumn tinkle of leaves dropping on the forest floor in a slight breeze, is like the gentle sound of the seashore, tiny waves rippling on a shingly beach. 

Kneeling down to look at a toadstool, I’m immediately transported into a whole different dimension of lichens, perfect fallen leaves, moss, fern fronds, and rotting wood. 

 And also a wood ant nest, the ants milling around carrying food to the large mound they’ve created for their home. It’s a scene of wonder yet one that is not really an aesthetic scene, for the wonder does not feel like ‘mine’ but instead seems to be spread out across the forest. I am stopped still, as this different reality soaks through me.

Feeling the forest from the inside is a very immediate and ungraspable experience. 

We’re so used to looking at screens that it’s as if we now live more and more in a flat representation of the world. So when we get up from our desk and look out the window towards the outdoors, the world becomes flattened scenery, almost like a backdrop to us. There’s no depth to it.

Even if you watch a nature documentary on TV, although you may well learn lots of interesting facts about say, the lives of badgers, there’s no sense of depth between you and them. Nature becomes something you look at, not something you are in and of.

This common belief in a flat objective representation of the world is a disembodied view of nature which we don’t feel part of, rather than the vast terrain in which we actually live and which greatly exceeds us. We increasingly come to inhabit a world of concepts, representations of reality. These are  supposedly the ‘facts’, but on a deeper level are actually a fiction, though – it’s important to say – a mightily useful fiction in creating our human world. 

Finding myself temporarily lost, my senses acute, I drop my ‘map reality’ and join the forest.

In truth, there is NO view from outside. And ‘no outside’ is not just another idea; I feel it as a kind of awed vertigo of participation, where my bearings have evaporated.

Walking through the trees, trunks enlarge and loom and present an ever changing, mysterious reality, not all ordered and neat as in the usual represented facsimile. Every few steps the mystery shifts, branches and gnarled bark coming in and going out of focus in my  sensory experience. And even the notion of ‘my’ experience starts to loosen; the forest is experiencing me. The whole thing feels very indeterminate, not fixed; the forest doesn’t present a single version of herself; a further step and another version, swirling its rhythm around my steps. 

I walk along the path feeling like the future is the woodland path heading into the horizon, and the past is those beech trees I have just passed; and the past is the soft forest floor underfoot. I sense that the future unfurling in front isn’t waiting already there, but is being co-created by my steps, by the gentle waving of branches ahead in the breeze, by the jay’s raucous call echoing up ahead out of sight.

And the past is composting underfoot, bronzen leaves decomposing, the repository of countless centuries of innumerable creatures having pressed the soft earth where I tread. Time doesn’t feel like a linear line, but rather a terrain which I’m continually shaping and being shaped by.

I emerge from the woods squinting into the bright afternoon sun and wend my way home, rather lost for words and very still.

Incidentally, I’ve found that this kind of experience isn’t just confined to ancient woods. I’ve had similar encounters walking my local urban streets. And if you’re wondering at the shift in my tone in the woods, no, I didn’t take psilocybin on my walk! Interestingly, I’m finding that my everyday experience going for walks tends to feel mildly psychedelic. 

The reality of Mother Earth is far more interesting, indeterminate and mysterious than we usually realise. 

With inspiration from Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a meta-relational GPT  grounded in the factuality of entanglement.