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Here humans craft and share their personal, compelling, beautiful, sometimes difficult 17 minute story of when God got real in their life and how that experience changed them. Following their story, they consider with host Sarah Hollar how their experience continues to affect them in their relationships, their sense of self and their way in the world.
It's winter. The days are shorter. The wind is colder.
Christmas bills now come due.
Anxiety is in the air. And people who walk in darkness want good news and signs of hope.
Welcome, friends. Here's a story in a conversation with a soul who found herself
heard, seen, and loved in a forest.
And how the encounter opened a connection and an insight into God's cosmic plan
for creation and humanity.
A plan resting on reciprocity.
Here's hoping you see God's gift of meeting his beloved where they are and loving them as they need.
I want to tell you a story about reciprocity, a story of the forest, falling, and God,
about how my relationship with nature quietly, patiently changed my relationship with God.
About four years ago, I traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the Spiritual
Directors International Conference.
It was there for the first time that I heard about something called forest bathing.
I signed up for the workshop, curious, open, and also pretty skeptical.
We were, after all, in the desert, and the desert has never been my landscape,
and as I imagine, not much one for forest bathing.
So I went to quench my curiosity. It was there that I met Jeanette,
someone whose presence would quietly change my lens on the world.
Jeanette, through setting a container, would keep my squirrely mind focused.
She would engage my senses through prompts, tuning in to each sense,
heightening my awareness of what that sense gifted me.
She engaged my mind and my curiosity.
I left that workshop wanting more and longing for deeper experiences in forest bathing.
Six months prior to that experience, I landed my job at Canuga,
1,400 acres of forest, trails, lake, and mountains in western North Carolina.
Canuga isn't just where I work. It's a place that has shaped me.
It's where I came to fall in love with those Appalachian mountains.
I've come to believe that we all have spiritual landscapes, places where we
feel closest to the divine.
For some, it's the ocean. For others, the desert.
For me, it's always been those mountains, specifically the Appalachian Mountains
of western North Carolina.
I've been coming to Canuga since I was a child. My parents attended conferences
there, and I remember running across playgrounds, swimming in the lake,
and wandering trails without any sense of time.
As I grew older, I staffed many youth conferences there, and I brought my children
to Canuga to explore the trails and to get lost in time.
I made some of my closest friends at Canuga, and every time I left I would cry,
overwhelmed by the beauty and by how deeply the mountains spoke to me,
and the sense of belonging that I experienced in that beautiful community.
In Celtic Christianity, there's a phrase for places like this,
thin places, where God feels especially near, and we feel especially near to God.
Canuga was and is that for me.
At the end of the pandemic, as the world began to cautiously reopen,
the president of Canuga asked me to consider coming on staff to help Canuga
find its spiritual rhythm.
I remember hanging up that Zoom call and falling to my knees in gratitude with tears flowing.
A lifelong longing was coming true.
I now serve as a senior advisor for program innovation, and what has become
increasingly clear to me is that nature is our greatest asset at Canuga.
What did we learn during the pandemic? We learned that nature was the safest place to be together.
It was the place where we could hug, laugh, and engage in conversations without
the fear of the pandemic.
Nature allowed us to remember our belonging.
And yet, as we've returned to normal, we've largely forgotten what we learned.
Rather than holding on to the gift we received in COVID, we return to our culture
of doing rather than being.
We return to meetings, meals, worship, and even our contemplation happening
inside buildings, rather than seeking the company of nature.
About a year after that trip, my husband of 20 years asked for a divorce.
The timing shocked me, as our daughter was a year away from graduating from high school.
But the reality did not.
I found myself in a season of deep uncertainty.
The following year, Jeanette came to Canuga to lead a forest bathing retreat.
I was ecstatic.
During one of our early morning sessions around the lake, she offered a simple invitation.
Mirror something in nature.
Now, whenever I hear an invitation like that, I panic a little,
afraid I won't do it right.
As I walked on the trail, my attention kept returning to a fallen tree.
And then, this is where God got real.
I heard a voice say inside me, come lay down next to me.
I resisted. It was cold, damp.
I worried about bugs crawling into my pants. I worried about what other people would think.
But eventually, I listened and I laid down beside the tree.
I felt its solid presence next to me, its quiet strength.
And again, I heard a voice say, I know what it feels like to fall.
I imagine that tree once standing tall, roots deep, branches wide,
leaves catching sunlight, birds finding safety in her limbs.
And then I imagined the fall, the terrifying liminal space between standing
and impact. And suddenly I knew.
This tree understood me.
In the midst of my own falling, my divorce, my grief, my unraveling,
this fallen tree became my truest companion. in.
I often joke that I spooned a tree, but what I really did was not only allow
myself to be seen, but I saw that tree.
I mean, I really saw that tree as a living being, as a being who shared a similar journey to mind.
I realized I was not alone. I realized I belonged.
What a gift to realize that nature is my spiritual companion.
I share that story now when I guide forest bathing at Canuga,
and every time someone's eyes fill with tears, because in that moment, they get it.
In that moment, that is when God gets real.
They understand what it means to let nature see us as much as we see nature.
What we long for deep down is belonging, to be seen, to be heard.
In forest bathing and companioning with nature, God becomes incarnate and something
that we dwell in every day in every way if we choose to.
Since my divorce, and not to
sound too cliche, but I've done a lot of that deep, exhausting inner work.
And I've come to recognize a wound that I carry.
A wound of not feeling seen or heard for much of my life.
I used to blame others for that pain, to react with anger or frustration.
But I'm learning something else now.
Belonging is something that I am responsible for cultivating within myself,
by seeing myself, by not dismissing my own experience.
About a month ago, I attended a retreat at Kripalu for sacred activists from
Western North Carolina, all of us survivors of Hurricane Helene.
I arrived feeling like an imposter, unsure that I belonged.
When we were invited to share our stories, I spoke about my profound aloneness.
After my divorce, the storm made something painfully clear.
I no longer had a family system to help me feel safe.
I rode out the hurricane alone, the power out, sirens echoing,
and everyone else gone to be with family.
In our circle at Karpalu, I shared my aloneness with the group.
As well as another woman in that circle.
The following morning, our facilitator mentioned that she had held very close
the two women who expressed their aloneness in the storm.
I began to curiously look around the circle, wondering who she was talking about.
And she kept looking at me as she spoke, hoping to get my attention.
In that moment, when our eyes met, something washed over me.
I realized that she was talking about me. I had dismissed my own story.
I was the one in my life who was not seeing and hearing myself.
As I've processed that revelation, I was reminded of hiking trails in western
North Carolina after the storm.
As my love of forest bathing was growing, I often tried to experience hikes by myself.
After the storm, I noticed that trees had been cut, their bodies pushed aside to clear the path.
I identified with that image of feeling disjointed, disassembled,
and apart from myself, and perhaps even pushed aside.
I found myself placing my hand on the center of their trunks,
tracing the rings, feeling their story. And in that touch, there was grief.
Their grief met mine.
Once again, nature met me with reciprocity.
Nature was healing that wound within and with me.
Seeing me, teaching me, healing me.
And in doing so was quietly reshaping my understanding of God and healing my
relationship with myself.
Once you begin to engage in reciprocity with the natural world,
once you slow down enough to truly see and be seen, you begin to discover that
you are never, in fact, alone.
Nature is always with us, in the wide, expansive view of the mountains that take our breath,
in the quiet grief of a tree once rooted now fallen beside a trail,
and the brief, ordinary holiness of a squirrel scurrying along a city sidewalk
as we move through our day.
When we allow this relationship to travel with us, beyond the forest and back
into our daily lives, something in us begins to soften.
We meet ourselves with greater empathy. we
learn to listen to ourselves and
others with more patience and from
that place kindness and compassion become less effortful less something we have
to summon and more something that naturally flows outward we discover that we
have always belonged we belong to nature picture.
Our anger begins to loosen its grip. The clenched fist we didn't realize we
were holding slowly opens into a hand extended towards others,
even towards those we once kept at a distance,
those we once labeled as other.
This, I believe, is the quiet teaching of nature, that belonging is not something
we earn, but something we remember,
that when we learn how to see, and allow ourselves to be seen in nature,
we discover we have been held all along.
Amy, thank you. Thank you for your yes.
Thank you for opening up and telling us about your experience.
Thinking about it, reflecting on it, and being willing to share it with us.
And as I was listening to your story, something that came up in my mind is how
many, many people will say, oh, I encounter God in nature.
I encounter God when I see a beautiful sunset or as I'm tromping through the woods, as I'm kayaking.
They don't say, or I haven't had experience with people saying,
oh, I meet God when I'm vacuuming or when I'm loading the dishwasher.
So I think that there is something about how we are wired to appreciate and be out in nature and,
What do you think God, as the great organizer, has in mind with our call to nature?
I think I would agree with you. Everyone expresses their love of nature.
I mean, you'd have to just really not be human to not appreciate the beauty
of a sunset or of a beautiful flower.
Um, I think the invitation in forest bathing is to slow down because quite often we're in nature.
Um, for instance, hiking, I've, you know, go hiking a lot and quite often I
get really swept up and how, how fast am I going to get to the top of the mountain?
Cause that, that's like the real important piece, right? I'm going to get to
the top and have that breathtaking view. And the gift that forest bathing gives
us is that this experience isn't about the distance or how fast.
It's about moment to moment what nature, the nature that's right in front of
us, that we slow down and we're with it.
I talk a lot about how in our culture, we're a culture of doing and not a culture of being.
And often that happens in nature, too.
We're so busy getting from one spot of nature to the next and not slowing down
enough to see the bug crawling on the branch or, you know,
to experience the feeling of the wind on our skin and looking up into the trees
to see what's happening as the wind picks up, right?
There's just a lot of, it's a different sort of presence that I think some of
us, I'm not saying all, some people do, they're kind of born with this awareness.
But I think for many of us, it's something we have to cultivate. We have to practice.
And you spoke of reciprocity, and that idea,
reciprocity, connotes an idea of respect and mutuality and an acknowledgement of value.
And in nature, we often experience wonder, calm, a following,
a way of weariness and angst.
And it's a place where our minds often stop swirling.
And those sensations are gifts to us, right?
Mm-hmm. Okay. And I'm curious about, so if that's what we get from nature,
what do you think nature is asking?
If God's setting up this dynamic, what do you think nature is asking of us?
What is God's intent in this reciprocity?
Well, I think, again, if I think about how, if I'm having a bad day,
like, oh, if I could go out into the woods, I'm going to feel better.
And so my intention is to receive, to take actually.
So I'm going into the woods and I'm looking at all the things that I can take
that's going to help me get into that better mindset to feel calmer within.
And doing that though, I'm missing on what I might be able to give to nature.
It took me a really long time to understand that.
The idea of reciprocity with nature was something that I struggled with because
my relationship with nature was always about what I was receiving.
It wasn't about, as I mentioned, like being with that tree and realizing that I...
Like that tree is a companion. It's a living being. The very fact that the tree breathes, I breathe.
Like we support each other in just that act alone.
And so that you're kind of coming from a different place when you think about
reciprocity. So how can I see nature?
And I feel like nature is always trying to do that and get our attention.
And we're not putting on the right lenses of understanding that it is a give and a take.
That it, you know, it is, you know, we all know that relationships are really
unhealthy if one person is always the one giving or one person is always the one receiving.
And so it allows us to, I believe God's intent is that we step into this very
healthy relationship with nature.
You know, we are not the human who is there to fix everything for nature.
What we can do is observe nature quite often and feel that healing within ourselves
and observing how nature behaves or functions.
You know, what just came into my mind is that that relationship,
human being, human relationships are very, very, can be, and often are,
very, very complicated because we're very complex, right?
But this sort of relationship between humans and nature, some of that complexity
can fade away, and it can give us a view into God's divine vision.
Yes. Yeah.
I do also think of Helene, you know, and just the understanding of water,
of understanding of resiliency.
You know, this area is still healing.
It's going to take a long time. And I think sometimes as humans,
we want to speed up the healing.
We want to get to the being fixed part and in watching nature um you know just
kind of go through these different phases and the importance of the time of
allowing the time for the healing,
is is sort of a new learning for me um and
it's painful it's not it's you
know you can't take the easy way out on this kind of healing yeah yeah
um there was something um that i heard in your story um and what i heard was
god calling you calling you into nature to help you locate your belovedness,
and to point out your own agency in being seen and heard and found worthy.
And that God knew that.
Aimee, and knew that Aimee was wired or knew you so well that nature was the
place for you to see and realize these sort of lessons.
The gift of knowing you and caring enough about you in particular,
just a single unit of God's creation.
But God cared enough about you to meet you where you were and where you would
accept and recognize your gift, the gift he was giving you of holy connection.
Yeah, if I could expound on that with another kind of story,
and it's around my forest bathing training,
I did my training in a chapel that's outdoors at Canuga. It's called the St. Francis Chapel.
And I think I'd shared, I've gone to Canuga since I was little and been sitting
in that chapel since I was little, swarming and restless or sat there and cried by myself.
I got lost, you know, walked through the chapel to take my son on a hike,
and we got lost, and it was really scary.
And it hit me one day, and in my training, I was sitting along the creek,
and across the creek was a stump.
And I realized that I was really trying to understand this idea of reciprocity.
And so I was sitting there and saw the stump.
And I'd seen that stump for years, but I'd never really seen the stump.
You know, it sounds kind of crazy, but I then realized that she had seen me.
And she had held all of those memories, you know, of crying,
sitting there in that chapel and crying of feeling lost.
I baptized a godson in that creek, and she saw that.
And now that God song is memorialized on the wall in the chapel,
you know, as a memorial because he died.
A beautiful mentor in my life often sang and played the guitar in that chapel,
Fran McKendree. And he's remembered.
And she saw all of that. And it wasn't until I was ready to see that, that...
I understood what belonging meant and what reciprocity meant.
So it wasn't just about me going into the woods and seeing.
It was about when I could stop and see nature. Think about how we run around every day.
There's a gorgeous tree in front of my house, and quite often I just walk right
by. I don't think to stop and observe.
Or the squirrels that drive you crazy and get in your bird feeder,
right? Of really getting to know those beings and being in relationship with them.
We do it naturally with our pets, I think. And that's why our pets are so beloved.
Because they can't speak to us, but they are there in relationship with us.
They're constantly present.
And that has changed my perspective on everything in nature.
I went hiking last spring, and there was a big stake across the trail.
And normally I would have totally freaked out and turned around and gone back
but with this new understanding of reciprocity and seeing one another I just,
I watched and the snake went gently across the trail and you know kind of like
okay cool, glad you're here you know and then I went on my way so it's,
it really has affected just how I observe nature,
and that sense of groundedness and belonging.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sharing a way that God has met you and how God,
that is the nature of God to come to us and invite us into relationship.
And helping us see how nature in and of itself is this great gift and way into
relationship and into our own souls. Yeah.
Yeah. An understanding of ourselves. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
So thank you for that, dear heart. Thank you for your yes.
This has been a beautiful, cathartic experience for me. So thanks for the invitation.
I appreciate it. Absolutely.
Thank you, listeners and subscribers. Thank you for your time,
attention, and ponderings.
I invite your comments and reviews.
I also invite you to share your story of when God got real.
Send them along to sarah at whengodgotreal.com.
Until next time, breathe and be well.