Forest Breath

Breathe in. The trees breathed this out for you.

This is not metaphor. The oxygen in this breath came from plants. From forests. From the photosynthetic work of hundreds of millions of trees converting sunlight and water and carbon dioxide into the oxygen your lungs need. The breath and the forest are connected in the most literal chemistry. You breathe what they release. They take what you release. A perfect exchange, running for three and a half billion years.

Close your eyes. You are in a forest. Not any specific forest. The archetype of a forest. The ideal form of it, which your body recognises because your ancestors spent tens of thousands of years in forest, and the body has not forgotten.

The smell of it arrives first. Petrichor if it has rained. The deep smell of decomposing leaves that is the smell of the forest floor, which is one of the most biologically complex surfaces on earth. Pine resin if there are conifers. The specific green smell of chlorophyll at work, sunlight being converted within leaves into energy.

Breathe it in. Slowly. All the way in. This air has come through the lungs of the forest. The trees have processed the sunlight and given you the by-product. In through the nose, all of it, the full breath.

Hold. At the top, for a moment, be in the exchange. You are at the pivot between receiving and returning. The breath you are holding was air before it was yours and will be air again after you release it. You are its temporary keeper.

Out. Long and slow. Back into the forest. The trees will take your carbon dioxide. They need it. You are not just receiving from the forest. You are feeding it. The exchange runs both ways. You are part of the ecosystem. Not outside looking in. Part.

In again. The forest air. Note how different this imagined sense of breathing is from your usual breathing, which is conducted without attention in rooms and buildings. The attention changes the quality of the breath. The imagined forest air, breathed consciously, does real things in the body. Calmer cortisol. Slower heart rate. The nervous system reading the input and responding: this is safe. This is where the body comes from. Rest.

The trees around you. Hundreds of them. Each one photosynthesising, each one releasing, each one a participant in the vast slow metabolism of the forest. The oldest ones around you have been breathing longer than you have been alive. They breathed through winters you will never see.

Inhale what they have spent years preparing. The oxygen in this breath took the tree a long time to make. It has been stored in the forest's account for this moment.

In. The green air. The forest giving.

Hold. The exchange.

Out. Returning. Giving back.

In.

Out.

You are not alone in this breath. The forest breathes with you.

It always has. You just forgot.

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