A relationship with nature is like any other in many ways: a source of physical nourishment, a way of regulating your mood and energy, a council of genuine wisdom when you're working through something difficult, and a framework for understanding where you are in your own life and what comes next. From what you eat and how you sleep, to the big questions about purpose and direction surface with a vengeance from time to time - nature has something real and practical to offer all of it, and you learn to reciprocate in ways that give you joy in return.

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It works because it draws on a much broader understanding of where human intelligence actually comes from than most of us in the industrialised Western world have been taught. Indigenous traditions across the globe - from the medicine wheel traditions of North America to Māori kaitiakitanga, from Celtic dúchas to Aboriginal Australian land knowledge - have long understood the person as a whole being whose wisdom is distributed across body, heart, mind and spirit, and whose clearest thinking only emerges when all of these are in conversation with each other and with the living world.

 

At last, this understanding is increasingly becoming supported by Western science: by research in ecopsychology, chemical ecology, and the biology of interspecies relationships - the measurable effects of soil microbiota on mood, of tree compounds on immune function, of mycorrhizal networks on the intelligence of living systems.

 

In both frameworks, nature isn't only a backdrop to human life, but an active participant in it.

Practically, it means that the plants you grow or forage have something real to offer your body and your nervous system. It means that the season you're in is a genuine map for what you need right now. It means that when you're sitting with a question you can't quite think your way through, taking it outside produces a genuinely different way of thinking.

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It seems that midlife is an especially good time to discover this, because at this time something is ready. The questions that tend to arrive at midlife - about what kinds of burden you're carrying and what you're ready to let go, about what an authentically good life looks like for you, about who you are when you're not defined by what you do for others - these aren't questions the rational mind can answers well on its own. They need time, and nature, and a thoroughly holistic self-awareness. Many women find that midlife, for all joys, transitions and challenges, is the first time they've been ready to listen like this, and they're often pulled very naturally towards nature for support. ​

 

Eden Rooted offers practical ways into this relationship. I invite you to take a look at the dropdown menu under Eden Rooted Pathways, where you'll find a variety of routes in, from workshops at Dilston Physic to downloadable courses and programmes you can follow in your own time, and the immersive work of the Eden Rooted Fellowship. Whatever feels like the right place to begin, the invitation is the same: to step outside, pay attention, and find out what the living world has to say to you.

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Do please get in touch with me if you have any questions, and sign up to the Newsletter to get news, ideas and activity updates as soon as they're out.