A natural high

Photo / Rosie Walford

This week we've read plenty about the nature of love. But wait. What about the love of nature? How come that doesn't get press?

Sure, the love of nature is no knee-trembler or heartwrenching romance. But there's a world of sensory titillation waiting if I peer inside the trumpet of a flower. A South Island vista can knock me speechless. Calm is as close as my nearest lake or stream. My senses have evolved through eons to experience that particular range of hues, forms and tones and, sure enough, I truly love the way that landscape tickles my sensuality and alters my state of mind.

Aromatherapy candles and retreat centres sell similar benefits but the unpackaged, unadvertised version is the real deal, the love affair which touches us all.

The attraction starts young. As children, we had sensitivities to all beings, animate and inanimate alike. As a small girl, enchantment would wash over me when I reached a certain mossy clearing in the trees. Butterflies embodied freedom, before I could speak their name.

Later, I became absorbed by brighter, faster ideas. For two decades I dedicated myself to all things urban and urbane. But gradually the whisper of trees broke through. I sighed when I noticed the clouds. One telling evening, rosella parrots swooping in formation seemed more exciting than the exhibition I'd just seen.

In Western industrial civilisation, we find ourselves participating almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. David Abrams, an anthropologist, describes this as "a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the landscape. We still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations."

Certainly, people gaze contentedly into the sea's surface or the bark of a pohutukawa. Those ripples and forms are composed on layers and layers of earlier ones and our senses are led to an inexhaustible depth; the figures never exactly repeat themselves. By contrast, when our eyes fall on mass produced objects from milk cartons to dishwashers, our senses go into a dance without variance. These artefacts can't surprise us. Before long we need something new if we're to stimulate ourselves.

We commonly assuage this restlessness by going shopping. The British mental health charity, Mind, suggests we should instead head for the hills to reliably boost our state of mind. Their studies show such profound statistical improvements in self-esteem, mood and stress through time in nature, that they actually recommend it be a clinically valid treatment for depression.

I know when I'm confused and go walking among trees, I find clarity of thought. I "get" what I need to let go of, or change. Away from comparison, judgment or cultural pressures, I grow light-footed and animated, occasionally reverent - and I like myself more.

The joy of trees certainly seems universal. When I take coaching clients into nature to support their creativity, shoulders always drop, ideas, flow, bigger perspectives emerge. Something makes us humans steadier in ourselves, more spacious with each other when in nature.

Science says it's the air. In a Californian study, researchers found 120 different chemical compounds in forest air. Some were coming from the bacteria and fungi in the soil, but most were given off by the trees. Trees release volatile organic compounds from little pockets between their leaf cells. When the plant's molecules come into contact with neurons in our nasal passageways, the olfactory nerves send messages directly to the limbic system in our brains.

In a part of ourselves more primary than language and rationality, the forest touches us - just like the pheromones of lust.

Eckhart Tolle, consciousness expert, explains it differently. He says that when our thinking mind enters untamed forest, it will only see chaos and disorder. It's not able, even, to differentiate between Life (good) and Death (bad) since new life grows out of rotting decay. As the mind gives up its habits of categorisation, it senses the incomprehensible harmony of the whole.

As I offer these reasons why I love nature, nothing explains it quite adequately. And that, of course, is very much the nature of love.