Following the Footpaths

An exploration of the five senses, and what they perceive, when one decides to take a forest bath.

Written by TJ Laggis, Photographed by Patrick Cox

In the beginning was nature. Whether one looks skyward with spiritual zeal or digs deep below the soil in scientific persistence, this fact remains universal. Past, present, future. Apes or Eden. Nature surrounds us, sustains us, surprises us. The phenomena of the physical world. Life itself. Mountains that shift in their slumber. Oceans that carve the coastlines. Sunlight that inspires each living thing to wake up and grow just a little bit more.

Everywhere around me is beauty, violence and grandeur. Yet I typically miss the entirety of it all, while on an absent-minded commute to work or lost in a catalog of browser tabs and streaming platforms.

It wasn’t until after I had turned 17, that I truly began to recognize the wonders of the woods. That is not to say I had never been in the woods before. In fact, the woods and I go way back. As a kid, I would spend my days roaming the dense backyard acreage with my friends from the neighborhood. Stone hopping between the bends of silty streams; making forts out of fallen branches and sturdy trunks. But here, beneath a patchy canopy of goliath Sequoias, the ones that seem to scrape the sky, something shifted, sprouted within me. I had spent my life sprinting through the forest, never thinking to stop and look more closely.

I was meant to be there, in that very moment. A sun-stained mosaic etched its way into the jagged plates of faded red bark. The scent of spice and pine drifted just above the blanket of needles on the forest floor. A gentle monarch butterfly sculpted the breeze with its orange, ink-dipped wings.

It was a breeze of greeting. Not a “nice to meet you” but a “welcome home.” I looked up to find my family far ahead, following along the trodden trail. I’d catch up eventually.

Now, after my humble and swift twentyone trips around the sun, years of trekking, exploring and discovering have all boiled down into one loosely stitched question. The same one that echoed through my mind as I gazed up in awe at the bleached cliff face of Half Dome or the red ravines of Zion. Why do I hike? Why do we, as humans, hike?

I liked to think of it the way a man by the name of John Muir did. "The world's big," he wrote, "and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark." It was a quote I saw in a gift shop outside Yellowstone. For a time, that was all I needed. A nice one-liner for anyone who asked why I liked the outdoors so much.

It only took a couple of times repeating it aloud, though, for Muir’s remarks to make me wish I’d dig deeper beneath the soil. Small talk was one thing, but I wanted to figure out the real reasons why I kept longing to be in nature. So, I wound back the clock.

Hiking. Rambling. Bushwalking. Backpacking. With much of the world underdeveloped and relatively unexplored, people actually lived in nature. We’re talking about the 1600s, when a walk to town required a lengthy stroll through the countryside. Entire civilizations, both at home and abroad, still sustained themselves by hunting and gathering.

What we consider to be hiking today was a tradition originally only acted out during religious pilgrimages or charting the frontier. Hiking had to be intentional, set apart, or else it would be mistaken as rather ordinary.

Its context evolved alongside us over time, intertwining itself with the development of the Romantic movement of the 18th century. As humanity pressed deeper into the complex landscapes across the Earth, for curiosity’s sake rather than necessity, regular people could now experience nature in all of its untainted glory. Many dreamed of becoming mountain men, betrothed to a life amid the rawness of the wilds.

I liked to think of it the way a man by the name of John Muir did. ‘The world’s big,’ he wrote, ‘and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.’ It was a quote I saw in a gift shop outside Yellowstone. For a time, that was all I needed. A nice one-liner for anyone who asked why I liked the outdoors so much.

European poets such as Switzerland’s Albrecht von Haller, as well as England’s Thomas West and William Wordsworth, popularized the idea of long walks in the wilderness and the rejuvenating qualities of a life spent wandering the mountains of the northern countryside.

With the coming of the 19th century, American writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman began producing works that depicted the beauty of the “promised land.” Manifest Destiny, the westward expansion in the continental United States, gave way to the works of John Muir, the man known today as the “Father of the National Parks.” As the world read these accounts of what magic was hidden beyond the comforting monotony of town, or citybased life, people yearned to explore these naturally occurring wonderlands.

Actual curated hiking trails, the ones we are familiar with today, equipped with informational bulletins and skill level charts, started to pop up around the woods more toward the turn of the millennium, when hiking became officially recognized as a recreational activity. Whether it be the national parks, the local state forests or someone matting down their route to a honey hole they found, everyone worked meticulously toward a common goal: to craft a trail that was beautiful. To shower those who walked it in the glow of Earth’s natural radiance.

What followed was a rush to protect land, build campsites, designate havens for wildlife, preserve natural landmarks and more. Trails splintered in every direction, carving their way across the untamed wilderness. Even now, they still serve as our guide rope, keeping us steady during our transitions back to our old, wooded stomping grounds.

Thus, the custom of hiking soon became a common, and shared, cultural experience, wherever nature could be found. Whether it’s a paved loop around a pond, a three-day camping trip in a national forest or clinging to the wind-whipped summit of Denali, humans have found so many ways to experience nature. Yet so few of us remember, in the busyness of our daily routines, to dust off our boots and explore for ourselves.

I was born in 1999. I was present for some of humanity's most dramatic shifts away from nature. It had been an ugly divorce, filled with fossil fuel fracking and melting polar ice caps.

After mankind entered the 21st century, technology enveloped the world like never before. Who needed nature anymore? There were light-speed laptops, full-length movies pressed into shiny DVD’s, video game consoles that could not only replicate reality but create new, fully customizable realities as well. Now, we have smartphones brimming with infinite content, cars that can drive themselves and solar satellites exploring the unknown chasms of deep space.

For all the blessings that have accompanied our technological advancements, I was glad to have known life before it all. Not that I wish to regress to the stone age. Nor do I have anything against lifesaving medical inventions or the ability to travel and connect with people in ways no one could have even dreamed of centuries ago.

There are truly wonderful things that technology has made possible and I’m thankful for it. But I also think of the generation that follows me. Kids who are born slaves to a screen, shackled to a social media presence, not knowing that there is a world far richer all around them — one waiting to be discovered, and one waiting to be rescued.

In their own reflections on their natureinfused childhoods, medical professionals Eva Selhub and Alan Logan pose a question in their book, “Your Brain on Nature.” “What might happen if those memories didn’t exist?” they wrote. “What would happen if our childhood experiences and relationships to the natural world were to be shaped exclusively by pixelated images and time spent in front of a screen?”

Their question was enough to inspire a trip through the dog-eared memories of my ownyears as a little kid. I found myself leaping into piles of autumn leaves that my dad had spent the last hour raking up, sledding on a snow day, bundled head to toe in handme-down attire, making a moat in the sand before the crashing waves could wash away all my hard work.

Thinking about a life without such things made my blood run cold. Those moments were more than just good ideas for scrapbook pages. They were me. Each one a snapshot, a poem, a painting that collaged into the portrait of who I am today. The rings behind bark taught me to endure. The flowers blooming in the wake of a storm taught me to be patient. The hills chiseled by glaciers taught me to be strong. If I were to be unplugged from nature so abruptly, so completely, then I might very well cease to exist, I suppose.

Growing up, I had a fairly cut and dry definition of hiking. I used to think it was about making your way through a maze of switchbacks and colored dots to be rewarded with a particularly gorgeous view. Clearly many others have assumed the same. Hiking maps, trail heads, online ads, all boast the breathtaking views of hallowed mountains and glassy lakes. How could we not? Are they not the most beautiful strokes to flow from the brush of the Creator? But then I happened to actually read some of the poetic prose of Muir, Thoreau and the great Whitman, for myself.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see,” wrote Thoreau. It wasn’t until my next trip into the evergreen hills of the coastal Acadia National Park that I understood what exactly he meant. All I took with me was water and a few power bars in a beat-up, dirty-green, air force bag. No iPhone, no Nikon, nothing but my five senses and undivided attention. My mind raced in circles, panicking without its usual buffet of dopamine stimuli. I fought against the urge to turn back, to come up with an excuse that would let me put off this experiment for another day, or week, or month. This time, however, nature won me over.

Within an hour of hiking, I was completely lost but entirely unaware of it. I was overwhelmed by the beauty that had always existed but had gone unrecognized for far too long.

Nature is about the only place left I can go, outside my apartment, and not think twice about filling my lungs with fresh air.

The earth is rude,” wrote Whitman, “Silent, incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged — keep on — there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.” It’s not an instantaneous effect. One doesn’t simply cross past the first bush of a garden and suddenly enter into a threshold of enlightenment. It’s something we learn over a lifetime. Our love, our curiosity, our relationship with nature grows with each passing moment we spend exploring.

There is the cliched saying, “It’s about the journey, not the destination.” It’s the type of phrase you hear all the time. So often, in fact, that you forget to process what it actually means.

The older I got, the more it sunk in. And sure enough, the more I looked, the more I saw along the way. The further I ventured, the harder it was for me to want to hop back in my car and drive back to my suburban nest. I realized that, throughout my entire life, I had been missing out on so much of what nature had to offer. By no means did I miss a single second standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon or watching the sun slip slowly behind the silhouette of the Tetons. But, that’s the thing. It wasn’t about the scenic overlook or the picture at the summit, not entirely at least. What made those memories so nostalgic, so awe-inspiring, in the end, were the little miracles I would stumble upon with every step I took across the forest.

The way a fern fans out its leaves, soaking in the sunshine that slips through the treetops. The birds calling to one another in a spontaneous symphony of chirps and song. The water as it tumbles freely over rocks, under branches, leaping in jaunty streams, from pool to pool.

Can you see it? Can you smell it? Can you feel it sweeping over you? A calm, an inner peace, a deep, quiet whisper within that says, “This feels right.” The intensity of such an immersive sensation alone was enough to keep me returning to the wilderness, time and time again, in search of that feeling. It was beautiful but I would soon learn there was more to nature than what meets the eye.

In my self-proclaimed “awakening” to the forest’s secrets, I came across the name of what I had been experiencing recently out in the woods. It was a process called “shinrinyoku,” or forest bathing.

Originally, shinrin-yoku is a concept that stems from Japan during the 1980s. Forest bathing is not simply an activity, but a lifestyle centered around a therapeutic intimacy with the natural world.

It’s been quite a while now since we traded the great outdoors for assigned rooms and artificial light. We were never intended to live out our lives in boxes. Why do you think we breathe deeper in the snowy mountain air or under the shade of a wide-reaching dogwood?

Each day I arrive at the forest’s edge; I’m never calm. Nature is about the only place left I can go, outside my apartment, and not think twice about filling my lungs with fresh air. It doesn’t help that I spend the car ride there mulling over the chaotic unraveling of my weekdays, but in times like this shutting off my brain often seems impossible.

Even if we disregard the global pandemic, the dumpster fire that is politics and the explosions of hate and death across the world, everyday life, in and of itself, is stressful. Creative block, a throng of thoughts arguing for attention, figuring out how I’m going to find the motivation to do anything productive. More often than not, we fail to recognize how suffering through barrage after crippling barrage of anxiety, stress and depression drains us of life. It makes us forget who we are. If you’re feeling this similar fog of burnout or utter turmoil, then you’re in luck. That’s the wild reaching out.

The journey begins before you’re totally aware of it,” wrote Julia Plevin, in her book “The Healing Magic of Forest Bathing.” It seemed like a reasonable place to start looking for answers. “The call to return to nature — your true nature — comes from deep inside and often manifests as chaos in life before you really begin to pay attention,” Plevin wrote.

The first time I took an intentional forest bath, I was in a cozy corner of my hometown woods, a place called Chatfield Hollow. Realistically, I could have gone anywhere. A forest. A mountain. A beach. A garden. Preferably somewhere pretty and peaceful, framed by nature. But I chose Chatfield, a place distantly familiar, where I had vague touchstones and a warm connection.

It had been some time since my last visit. Before I stepped off onto Lookout Trail, I stopped to take a deep breath. It was a rush of cool December air, the kind that fills your lungs with Christmas and a frosty yet refreshing awareness of your surroundings. I’m not really sure why, or how, but I looked around and remembered something so simple from my growing library of nature reading material: The forest was — is — alive.

Touch is the most dramatic of the senses. It is pleasure, it is pain, it is the biting cold and the bubble bath. It is the very first sense we ever encounter after just eight weeks of life in the womb.

Her breath rustled the layers of foliage in drafts of that same cheerfully cool air, her heartbeat pulsed beneath the veins of roots and waterways. Once I’d been properly reacquainted with Mother Nature, I was free to continue my conversation with her.

I started to walk differently after that, treading lightly, zig-zagging my way through the puddles that formed over damp leaves and graveled rock. I started to learn the language of the forest. A universal language: beauty.

It makes sense why my eyes arrived first to the forest that day. As humans, we are naturally sight-oriented creatures. Studies conducted at the University of Toronto show that people can remember more than 2000 pictures with at least 90% accuracy. David Ripley and Thomas Politzer had similar findings with their neurorehabilitation research indicating, “80-85% of our perception, learning, cognition and activities are mediated through vision.”

It’s how we understand the world around us. We are constantly observing. Even when we’re asleep, we see sprawling dreamscapes in full color. Here in Chatfield, Colo., the forest did not disappoint. She had prepared a feast for my Zoom-weary gaze.

I noticed how she greeted me, like her longlost little one. She dotted the sky with clouds, each adorned with crowns of sun and gowns of distant rain. She laid out patches of wild lilies and brambles of red-berried holly. A stunning display made just for me. I say just for me since my Ford Escape was the only car in the icy parking lot that evening, but the cold didn’t keep the forest from showing off the best of her heirlooms and relics.

Despite our sight’s dominant hold on our brain, it is not the strongest of the five senses. In a 2012 study conducted by the Smell and Taste Clinic at the University of Dresden Medical School on the neuroanatomy of odors, experts discovered that the sense of smell is capable of activating more regions of the brain than sight. Through behavioral indicators, they also found that smell, out of all the senses, was the one responsible for retrieving the oldest, richest, most emotional memories stored away in a person’s mind.

Every day, entirely oblivious to the process, I had been gathering time-travel tokens. Fall rain. Sunscreen. Laundry detergent. Bonfires. Low tide. Cinnamon buns. Mowed grass. Gasoline. Birchwood. Warm cookies. The list might very well be infinite, but each moment tethered to a smell is just as vivid as it ever was.

The smell of maple and winter frost had a way of soothing me. The incessant bickering of my worries and aliments drifted away on the gentle waves of fresh air, slipping beneath the cover of my subconscious. As my breaths grew deeper, fuller, I was able to be more present, take more in.

Life out here was slow. In a culture so prone to efficiency and speed, I often forget that life ought to be that way more often. There’s no need to race one another to an early grave, yet for some reason, we always insist on racing anyways. We need the best; we need the most and we are constantly reminded of how far from those goals we actually are anytime we turn on our phones. It was not until I stepped away from my arsenals of screens and machines, that I felt awake. At ease, even. I found a spot, just big enough for my backpack and me. An out-jutting rock hung over the edge of a lively little stream and seemed like the proper place for a snack break. Something was different though, as I cracked open the thermos lid. Those deep breaths of fresh air I had been so focused on earlier were swirling, morphing in wild collisions along my taste buds. Hand-crafted root beer and river water foam. Smoothed over stone and cold vanilla. Melted snow and warm apple crisp.

Taste, often designated solely to the evaluation of food flavors during meals, is, in my opinion, a rather underappreciated sense. Because of its common occupation, however, it is closely associated with our sense of smell. In findings published by the Journal of Food Science, researchers at Cornell University uncovered that taste actually unifies the senses. Different subjects were brought to a variety of locations and given a sample of food to try. Radically different opinions of the food depended directly on the environment the person was in while eating. Taste was pulled from all of the other senses to create a more complete and authentic experience for the palette.

Nothing else in life mattered for those few moments on the rock ledge. For an undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety stricken and overthinking hypochondriac, such as me, the previous experience was quite rare.

Due to massive strides by researchers in understanding the fields of psychology and psychiatry, we now see more people

than ever before in human history are plagued by mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, impulsivity, scattered attention spans, burnout. Experts have attributed these imbalances in the brain to a number of possible triggers. For some it’s the side effects of urbanized isolation. For others it’s the maladaptive habits of alcoholism and drug addiction, or the consistent overuse and abuse of technology. It could be financial debt or a strained relationship. The list only gets longer and more inclusive. That thorn in your shoe, the one that keeps digging into your heel, may have earned itself a new nickname:

“Nature-deficit disorder.”

It was a diagnosis coined by author and journalist, Richard Louv in his book, “Last Child in the Woods.” Although not a widely recognized mental disorder, nature-deficit is rooted in the reality that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors. The disorder seeks to explain such drastic behavioral problems that have evolved in recent decades.

Environmental Health Perspectives published an article titled “Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda.” The research within estimates that Americans spend more than 90% of their time indoors. That accounts for any time in your home, office or mode of transportation. They also found that roughly four out of five Americans live in naturedeprived urban settings.

This time indoors is often saturated by televisions and tablets, iMessage and Instagram. Children younger than 8 years old are averaging 1 hour 55 minutes of screen time daily, and by the time they grow to be 18 that daily average rises to 7 hours 38 minutes. “In 2016,” stated a team of Danish researchers, “the average ‘total media consumption’ was 10 hours 39 minutes per day among young adults and was rising.” The article also overlays survey results ranging from 2004 to 2016 to chart the trend. Across the U.S., activities such as park visitation, hunting, fishing and camping “have all declined substantially over recent decades.”

In just nine months of quarantine, I’ve watched myself slip slowly into the ones and zeroes, trading the real world for a digital one. One blurred by filters and green screens.

According to the research, it looks like I’m not the only one who had started to forget about the forest. This computer-induced amnesia was happening long before COVID-19 struck.

My love language is physical touch. No one, apart from my girlfriend, really cares, I’m sure, but it was, and still is, my way of reaching back out to the forest. I treated Chatfield Hollow the way I would have treated my childhood bedroom, after having left it for a year or two. I picked things up, turned them over in my hand, studied them as if each mushroom cap or hollowed log was a prehistoric fossil, something from another planet altogether.

Touch is the most dramatic of the senses. It is pleasure, it is pain, it is the biting cold and the bubble bath. It is the very first sense we ever encounter after just eight weeks of life in the womb.

Dr. Qing Li was the first to champion the ideas of “forest medicine” as he called it. Studies conducted by medical professionals on the connections between forest exposure and human health has proved, on numerous occasions, nature significantly decreases stress levels, heart rate and blood pressure, all while improving your immune system, mood, creative connections and overall energy.

Many of these developments occur during our tactile, kinesthetic experiences. Scientists revealed, in a research article published by The New York Times, that touch has a significant connection to a very influential region of the brain: the frontal insula. “It is in the frontal insula,” says Dr. Arthur Craig, a neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute, “that simple body states or sensations are recast as social emotions.” When I pet a golden retriever pup it is translated into delight and happiness, relaxing my racing mind and rapid heart rate. When I wrangle the reel after a rainbow trout snatches my lure, my brain’s translation reads excitement and admiration, sharpening my focus and improving my mood, after a long day of nibbles and stolen bait.

It had been some time since I entered the forest that wintry afternoon, in hopes of tapping into the transcendent experience of a forest bath. I would find a spot to sit, a little patch of sunshine or a patchy quilt of moss, then after a while I’d get up and wander some more. Without the deafening waves of white noise and constant chatter, I listened only to the quiet of the forest.

It was louder, more intense than I remembered. What I was hearing wasn’t silence entirely but nor was it noisy like a subway station. The forest was an intricately balanced melody of space and sound. Crunching leaves, bird calls, bubbling brooks, snapping sticks, frog croaks and cricket chirps.

It didn’t take very long, out in the woods, for my eardrums to relax. There was no effort involved, sound just came and went as it pleased, like a jazz band made of water and wood.

In a research effort at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Dr. Cassandra Gould van Praag worked in collaboration with visual artist Mark Ware. Their experiment monitored people’s brain activity when played sounds from nature versus the artificial noise of urban environments. Natural sounds produced brain connectivity that, “reflected an outward-directed focus of attention.” Artificial noise, conversely, produced brain connectivity that, “reflected an inwarddirected focus of attention, similar to states observed in anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.”

Hearing is arguably the most complex phenomena of the five senses. From the labyrinthine inner channels of the ear to the processing of sound wave vibrations, our hearing is responsible not only for the blessed invention of music but also our sense of balance and equalized air pressure. A miracle in design, truly. Far more perceptive than I realized, once I took out my earbuds and let myself listen.

After stretching each sense individually, I felt now that I had finally, officially arrived in the wilderness. I felt free to use them all at once, to converse with nature, with myself, with God. At times with all three or sometimes none at all. I spoke candidly, quietly, loudly, with my own voice and my own clumsy words. As I let my thoughts unravel and untangle themselves through my words, I learned that I appreciated honesty with myself instead of excuses. A small realization but one I may have not discovered had I missed this moment. Just as the rippled rings showed the many lives of the aging pines around me, in turn, I too discovered a new layer within myself.

In my experience, hiking, forest bathing, the trips into the wilderness, none of it is hinged on walking away with a product or epiphany. Walking in nature, at its core, is about the subconscious search for your inward beauty as you consciously seek and reflect on outward beauty. It happens naturally, no pun intended.

Some of my most intimate moments exploring nature have never found their way into a Word document. Someday they might, but I’m in no rush. I’ve learned the hard way not to always try and force the world into one-inch margins. When the time is right, the words will flow. Those memories will always be as vivid as etched stone. The key is tenacity and consistency. Meeting the muse in her living room, as often as I can, instead of waiting for her to arrive at my desk.

“Keep close to Nature’s heart,” wrote Muir. “Break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” It was as if the forest planned it so, before the purple clouds turned gray, I arrived at the empty visitor lot of Chatfield Hollow.

I love trails that end in loops. It’s almost as if that one particular section of forest had always been destined for a scenic backwoods path. One that would showcase our interconnectedness with the Earth, all neatly arranged within an odd, organic perimeter.

On my drive home, chasing the sun toward the west, I noticed how nature paints with every color our computers can’t seem to quite capture. Trees and rivers sprouted and branched like blood vessels. Clouds shifted like tempered moods. Leaves stretched and withered with the changing of the season, growing old with wrinkles of scarlet and burnt tangerine.

Portraits and still lives painted in the rippled reflections of fresh water ponds. No pine cone or dragonfly was insignificant, not a single one left missing from view, even at 45 miles per hour. If I looked hard enough and long enough, I could see them. I saw their brilliance, and, in their brilliance, I began to rediscover my own. The brilliance my mom always saw in my abstract finger paintings from kindergarten. The brilliance my dog saw, wagging his tail as I walked through the door. The brilliance I saw the day I got my driver’s license.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature,” writes Muir, “he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

Who knows? It might just be the thread that unties the knots of worry and stress bunched in your chest. Maybe you’ll discover a new thing or two while you’re out there. Worse case-scenario, you’ll have a good time exploring.

The wild is calling. I’m sure she’s got something good to share. You’ll never know unless you go.