creative journeys from home

Your Gift From The Forest Bathing Studio

Invitation Cards

 
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How to use your one-of-a-kind digital nature invitation card:
After visiting the forest bathing studio, your card acts as a gentle reminder to connect with nature using your senses. Follow the prompt in any way that feels right to you, and let your natural surroundings show you the way. You may repeat the invitation throughout the week or tuck the card away to try again at a later time. After collecting a few cards, why not create your own invitation card folder for a little inspiration when you need a dose of nature?

Hope to see you in the Forest Bathing Studio again soon!

Studio Resources For You To Download:

Find our weekly poem/Reading:

  • December 15th: “Matins” (Morning Prayer) John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

  • December 1st: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost

  • November 24th: “For the senses,” John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

  • November 17th:

Lecturing on electricity at the Royal Institution, London, in 1858, Faraday said to his audience, “I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your mind.”

Letting the facts form a poem in your mind is an exercise in a certain kind of thinking: letting something happen instead of forcing it to happen, and simultaneously letting yourself be enlarged. Letting the facts form a poem in your mind is a way to practice thinking like an ecosystem, thinking like a planet, thinking like a world.

— Robert Bringhurst, “The Mind of the Wild,” Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis

  • November 10th: “Kinship,” Ursula K. Le Guin

  • November 3rd:

For quite a while now, I’ve been pretending. That I was tired. That the light was bad. But my eyes are really getting worse. I’m afraid to go to the doctor because I’m afraid of what he’ll say. Which is silly. Either there is something to be done. Or there is not. If it’s glasses, hallelujah, and help me find the money. If it’s an operation, see me through. If I am going blind, hold me. Help me put down the terror that rises in my gut at the word. Blind. There. I’ve said it. The ghost word that has been haunting me. Help me remember, if I have to walk in the dark, that I have had a lot of years of seeing clean and clear. I know the slender shape of a birch tree. I have seen thousands and thousands of things in my life. I can conjure them in my mind’s eye. No matter what happens, I shall not be without beautiful sights. It is just that I may have to settle for the ones I have already seen.

— Elise Maclay, Green Winter: Celebrations of Old Age

The Shape of Silence

Drifting down the river
Of another pink morning
I think about how the empty page
Emits its own particular light,
And were a shadow to fall upon it
That, too, is but another kind of writing.
Imagine reading a novel
Where instead of looking at the words
Your gaze was fixed on the spaces
Between them. When you get to the end,
What would you say of what you saw and felt?
I close the book and look up.
A thin blue line is falling asleep on the horizon
As the breeze reaches the end of its lullaby.
I study what’s left of my reflection in the water.
I see now that your nakedness was never mine.

— Matthew Wong, Matthew Wong: Blue View

 
“To touch the coarse skin of an oak tree with one’s fingers is also, at the same moment, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. Similarly, to gaze out at a forested hillside is also to feel one’s own visibility, and to feel oneself exposed to that hillside—to feel oneself seen by those trees.”
— Monica Gagliano, evolutionary ecologist