Does the natural world communicate with us? (1/10/2026)

I have started to read a book by Robert Macfarlane entitled “Is a River Alive.” In the introduction he writes that his 9-year-old son asked him the title and premis of the book, and when he told him, his son said: “well, that is going to be a short book, of course it is.” Reading this I wondered whether nature or the natural environment is talking to us. I am a pantheist and would like to argue that even rocks, stones, and clouds are alive and communicate with us, even though they do not have DNA.

This idea reminds me of a post I wrote some time ago entitled: “Does the world love us.” These are interesting questions. I know that I love the world. I take a walk with my dogs in the woods behind our home almost every morning. I wrote about this in 2018 (The Old Man and the Woods), where I describe taking a walk with our previous dog Jake. To think I called myself old more than 7 years ago. I had just re-read Hemingway’s book “The Old Man and the Sea,” and felt inspired by it. I just used the title to spin off the title of my post.

I try to live in the moment whenever I am out in nature. I always look around, take it all in and try to learn. For example, I love large beech trees; I like their elephant skin like bark, and I love their root spread. During the past years I have tried to make an inventory of the large beech trees in the woods behind our home. I do this by getting off the trails and bushwacking. To date I have found 17 bigger trees. I have no idea how old they are, but I always wonder if they were planted by folks that lived back there before it was converted to park land, and unlike the pines, oaks and maples these beeches were never harvested.

One of the beeches I found the other day

I am in LOVE, whenever I am in nature. Even in times like the other morning when we ran into Blondie, the blond coyote and our two dogs go absolutely insane. But as the song goes “Love hurts,” and I often find it more entertaining that aggravating, even if their howls and barks are deafening and they are trying to pull your arm off (yes, we always walk them on the leash). Those coyotes are getting bolder. Early in the morning, around 2 am on January 1 and 3 they were in our neighborhood, just a few houses over. Their howling and japing woke our dogs, and our dogs woke us. It was crazy.

But back to our woods. Before the invasion of the English settlers, the woods behind our home were the home of the Kiskiack tribe, a group that was part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Kiskiack means wide land or broad place in their native language, and it also seems to be the name of the town they lived in, near the current Yorktown. From what I can determine, the woods must have been cleared in spots for agriculture using slash and burn. Corn was their main crop. The area was also used as hunting grounds.

The Brits eventually cleared large tracks for the cultivation of tobacco. Our woods were part of something that was called the Edgehill Plantation, although there was no actual plantation house. The area was straddled by two roads: Warwick to York and Hampton to York (later on Warwick was incorporated into the town of Newport News). During those times, our region was a very active participant in the Revolution and later the Civil War. I wrote a tongue in cheek post about it once <here>.

I do not exactly know what happened after the civil war. It was around the 1930s when our immediate area was taken over by the National Park Service and most likely the Newport News water works. Recently, we examined the tree rings of a large pine that had fallen across our trail, and someone cut the trunk to allow passage. Dating it by counting the tree rings showed us that it was approximately 80 years old. It appears that the tree probably germinated around the 1940s and was allowed to grow without much interference. This again dates to a time just after the annexation of the area by the Park Service. The tree was one of the bigger ones and is located in an area with some of the largest trees in the woods behind our home.

There is so much to explore and think about when I walk through nature, listening to nature talking to me and to each other.

The beeches so far

A good haul today, we found 3

Bonsai spirituality (10/14/2021)

A recent bonsai YouTube video that I watched was somewhat different. Peter Chan from Herrons Bonsai was interviewing an ex thug or reformed criminal about his path to bonsai and nature combined with it his straightening out, and finding of religion. Claud Jackson wrote a book about his journey: “From Guns to God.” While I am not going to discuss the book (I have not read it), religion (I am not particularly religious or believe in their or any god, regular readers know I am a Unitarian and more a pantheist), I do have a couple of issues I want to discuss here. This discussion just brought some of these thoughts to mind.

Now I am a great fan of Peter’s videos and instruction, and while this video was not about trimming or working on plants, it was the second or third one that he has done on the connection between the mind (or soul) and our hobby. This one disappointed me a bit and that was because in my eyes, he did not go deep enough. Understandably so? Maybe, Claud is 6’8” and Peter is only 5’7”. Be your own judge and watch it yourself.

Many of you know, I am a naturalist, biologist, a person who strongly believes in forest bathing or Shinrin-yoku. I have written extensively about it and even presented a sermon in my church about it. I actually wrote a draft sermon that compared growing a bonsai to growing a church.  Being out in nature helps me meditate and so does working on my trees. During those times I just live in the moment and lose my perception of time and space. Being a biologist at times I cannot help trying to find a scientific explanation in my mind to the phenomenon that I am seeing or try to identify a plant or a fern that I stumble upon. But that is living in the moment and not thinking about the other things in life.

This was what was lacking in Peter’s interview with Claud in my eyes. They were dancing around the subject and never getting there. For someone who is studying to get ordained as a minister of the church of England I was disappointed by the lack of spirituality during the discussion.

Why the hell am I growing bonsai? It is something I have asked myself many times over the years. Is it a spiritual thing? Probably not; at least not when I started. I was just fascinated by the fact that you could make trees look so miniature. It all started with a visit to Longwood Gardens in late 1977. We were just married, and it was our first visit to the in-laws in Delaware. Longwood has a nice bonsai exhibit and I fell in love with the idea of growing miniature trees. I remember visiting the National Arboretum a few years later and that did it.

My spiritual journey with bonsai started a lot later. It was not until we settled here in Virginia (2000) that I was really bitten by the bug again. I started to take it serious again eight or so years ago. Yes, I had trees ever since we finally decided to “permanently” settle in the U.S. in 1986. As a good Dutchman we collected a few houseplants, and I befriended a guy who ran a nursery and off I went. I still have some of the trees I acquired at that time, although, as I mentioned in at least one of my posts, since I ignored them for some time on top of not knowing what to do with them, you would definitely not know that they are more than 30 years old. For one, I am not going to let you cut them and count their growth rings. However, they did not have YouTube at the time and the magazines and books did not push me hard enough to be that adventurous or extreme in cutting roots etc. Despite all that, I still love to tell visitors that these trees are older than or as old as my daughter.

Whether it is working with miniature nature or walking in big nature, I enjoy it and it all has become somewhat spiritual to me. Believe it or not, I talk to my trees; I tell them what I am going to do to them. Maybe I am going insane, and I am talking to myself, but it is a good way to remember things, thinking out loud. While pruning and discuss choices with myself, it is meditative.

It is not different when I walk in the woods. I love to linger, stop for a second, look at a trunk of a tree, touch it, feel it, see how the roots spread; take a picture of a mushroom, a sign of a symbiont, a perfect union. Now I need to start thinking about creating some bonsai forests. One of my favorite YouTubers Nigel Saunders from the Bonsai Zone is really into that, and he has some really cool forests or landscapes. He put in pathways and imagines people walking through the landscapes. I am still too timid to do something like that, although I have plans with a set of crab apples plants that I have.

Just a trunk of a dogwood tree that I walked by during a hike last weekend.  I love the bark of dogwoods and I am planning to dig up a seedling this winter and will try to grow one in a pot.  Wish me luck.

If you are just starting out on a bonsai journey, on a forest bathing journey, or even a spirituality journey, check these two bonsai guys out. Peter has at least two discussions on spirituality, while Nigel used to take you out on his walks and bike rides through the woods near his home. Nigel would explore trees and landscapes during outings but has not done this much lately. He has been way too busy building a greenhouse or his plant room. Explore my blog posts and check out the keywords root, nature, forest bathing, trees, bonsai, spirituality and alike. Come back, as I mentioned before, I will try to be less political and concentrate more on bonsai, and be more educational, environmental, and spiritual.

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world (2/21/2018)

It was Henry David Thoreau who wrote: “When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.” There is such a richness in this phrase that I want to sit back and take it apart.

The words “recreate myself” did he mean recreation as going on vacation or what we do in the present like going for a walk. Or, on the other hand, did he actually wanted to start from scratch and reinvent himself; did he have enough of it all and start all over again? Is this the same concept? 

What did he do? He entered nature; the darkest woods, the thickest, and most impenetrable. Something he calls a sanctum sanctorum that is far away from human society, but only a half hour away.

It seems though, that this is what Thoreau needed to recharge when he needed to get away from the craziness of the world and everything around him. It is in those woods that he had his cabin and spend a year as a monk living and observing and writing about the novelty.

Nina Beth Cardin wrote in the Bay Journal about her changing views of nature, which she calls enchantment. Her love deepened after learning more about what she was actually seeing in her back yard. As she describes it the trees, lichens, fungi, and later on from splitting and burning wood.

The phrase “Knowledge is Power” is often attributed to Francis Bacon, and readers of my blog know that I have quoted him (and this particular phrase) before, but I think Ms. Cardin shows evidence of that. A deeper knowledge and understanding of what you see often enhances the enjoyment. I am sure this is what Thoreau experienced and many others do too when they learn more about a subject. Anyway, this is one of the objectives of my blog. While I do not want to be too school-teacher-like in my blogs, I do hope that I can help some of you understand some of my love for nature, for biology, ecology and the environment in general. The other night in yoga, we had to concentrate on a word on what we wanted to think about ourselves and the first word that came to mind was educator.

Why is this so important to me? I like to mirror what Ms. Cardin quoted the botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey who wrote 100 years ago: “One does not act rightly toward one’s fellows if one does not know how to act rightly toward the earth.” I too strongly believe in the importance of the inner connectedness that we humans have with the earth and nature. When stressed and upset, going into the woods is my way of de-stressing; forest bathing is such an important thing for me. Yes there are the volatile chemicals (phytoncides) breathe in, but there is so much more. John Muir wrote: “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.” When I spend time in nature I enter a different place every step I take I enter that new world and I renew, recreate inside; the worries of world slide off my shoulders.

"Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world" (John Muir)

All I can say is: go out and enjoy nature. Yes, it is more fun when you know what you are looking at, but you don’t have to. More important is to let nature come over you. You may need to protect yourself against bugs, but in most cases that is the scariest thing you'll encounter. Go ahead ask me questions about nature, I will try to answer in the hope to increase your enjoyment of nature. But remember, you can enter that new world too and it does not have to be two pines!

Charlottesville (3/30/2015) ... or about man's dominion over nature.

Monday included another afternoon road trip, this time to Charlottesville for a class I'll be teaching tomorrow.   It was a strange day that started out with a migraine and I was dragging.   Waiting for ever thing to settle down and the pain killer to work, I picked up a book that I've been working through on environmental justice (see the tab on my blog about books I've been reading for the title).  I am reading this book because of an interest I have in how to sell conservation in particular to people who are more cavalier about environmental protection.   I am very passionate when I teach and hopefully I can convert one or two persons and make them respect and protect the natural environment, but I am still frustrated that some people still don't get it.

Reading the book I hit the point on the so called idea that man has been given dominance over the natural environment by our Christian god (Genesis 1:26).  Being a Pantheist, I believe in the Devine in everything and in humans being part of it and not in charge of it.  But, I have often wondered how this thing about human dominion all got started, in particular since that attitude could be so destructive to the environment.  The authors of the chapter I was reading credits John Locke (1623-1704) for this notion, but reading a biography of Locke, it seems that he built on the philosophy of Francis Bacon, who interpreted the bible in such a way.  Granted this was all thought up in the 17th century and we did not know about photosynthesis,  evolution and other great scientific discoveries.

Locke had some other  interesting ideas.  He believed that "Land that is left wholly to Nature, that hath no improvement of Pasturage, Tillage, or Planting is called, as indeed it is, waste, and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing"  (Locke 1694, Second Treatise, Sec. 42-43).  In other words, nature itself was worthless and had no function.  Not the brightest idea, but on the other hand, Locke did have some great ideas on religion (tolerance) and private property, and some of his ideas were championed in the Americas.   It seems that Thomas Jefferson was a reader of Locke; and wow, here I find myself in Charlottesville the home of Jefferson.

Locke calculated that improved land derives 99 to 99.9 percent of its value from cultivation rather than from the land itself.  This philosophy still permeates part of our economic system and explains our relationship with nature and public land.

With this notion we are ignoring that:

1. Nature's inherent value apart from human utility,
2. Nature has a psycho-spiritual value,
3. Nature's ability to create (wildlife, natural resources but also oxygen, clean water),  
4. Humans are part of nature.

One of Locke's ideas was about waste.  He be lived that no one should enmass more property than he needed.  Man should not waste land and what he grows from the land; otherwise he had to share is excesses.  So Locke was a property guy who had somewhat socialistic tendencies before socialism was invented.  The biographer tells us that this notion was easily abandoned by Locke's followers with the invention of money.  Now the excess crops, milk or meat could be sold and would not go to waste (the birth of capitalism).

The photo below was taken at Monticello.   I got there 45 minutes before closing and the ticket police would not allow me to go for a short walk in the woods without paying.   Like I would be able to make it all the way up to the mansion in that time and take the free tour.  Oh well.  At least I got to look at the green roof above the gift store.  It is amazing how at least part of our society is finally understanding that Locke was just a reflection of the level of science at time he lived, and that nature has a function and value.  I think it would have been something Thomas Jefferson would have embraced; however, he would probably have grown crops on the roof.