Riversong Readings: Shinrin-Yoku

:shinrin-yoku: Forest bathing at Grandview in New River Gorge National Park

To mark the official launch of my newest ebook, Riversong: Creative, Holistic Approaches to Photographing New River Gorge, I am going to start a series of blog posts featuring excerpts from the book. These will be varied in nature, but today’s excerpt is pulled from the artistic discussion on one of my favorite images from the book:

:shinrin-yoku:

“This is one of those images that was a gift from nature. For me, it represents serendipity in its finest form and also the deeply healing power of nature.

On the morning I made this image, I began shooting before sunrise at the overlook. The gorge was filled almost to the brim with the fog that often forms overnight here, and there were lots of opportunities to shoot magical ridgeline isolations. Once the light became too bright and harsh, I headed back to my car where I boiled some water in my camp stove and made myself a hot coffee and some oatmeal. As I sat there looking towards the gorge and the light, the fog began rising until it eventually spilled up and over the rim of the gorge. Clear skies above the gorge meant the sun lit the fog from the side, creating some really incredible scenes through the forest. Waves of fog would rise and flow over the rim, and it was all very dynamic. So I hopped out with my coffee and dropped down just below the rim on a trail that was new to me – the Tunnel Trail. Walking through the fog-filled forest with light streaming in from the side was breathtaking, uplifting, and calming all at once, and it brought to mind the Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku. 

Shinrin-yoku loosely translates to forest-bathing, or making contact with and taking in the atmosphere of the forest. It is a Japanese wellbeing practice that aims to harmonize a person by bathing in the forest mindfully using all five senses. Practitioners can focus on anything they wish – the colors of leaves, the sound of wind moving through the canopy, or the beams of sunlight streaming through the fog. Research has clearly demonstrated the very real and beneficial effects this has on cortisol levels, blood pressure, heart rate, emotional state, and more, and current research focuses on using forest bathing as a strategy for preventative medicine as well as addiction treatment. In my experience, the practice of photography within a forest setting amplifies the beneficial effects of being there, by focusing my attention intensely on where I am, noticing all of the fine details, such as in this image where the trees seem to lean into or reach towards the light itself, or the way the silhouetted edge of the rocky land so subtley suggests the rim of the gorge. Forest-bathing and photography are just a magical and powerful combination and always, always medicine for my soul.

But this image is not just about the forest. The light shares the stage, as it is the dance between the forest and the light together that makes the image sing. And that brings to my mind a particular poem by poet and philosopher David Whyte called “Blessing for the Light.” Billed by Maria Popova as a “cinematic song of praise for the visible invisibilities and the silent symphonies that make life worth living,” the poem connotes a deep reverence for the nuanced ways in which we can see that which the light falls upon, the “delicate instruction” it affords.

Cover, Riversong: Creative, Holistic Approaches to Photographing New River Gorge

Blessing for the Light by David Whyte

I thank you, light, again,

for helping me to find

the outline of my daughter’s face,

I thank you light,

for the subtle way

your merest touch gives shape

to such things I could

only learn to love

through your delicate instruction,

and I thank you, this morning

waking again,

most intimately and secretly

for your visible invisibility,

the way you make me look

at the face of the world

so that everything becomes

an eye to everything else

and so that strangely,

I also see myself being seen,

so that I can be born again

in that sight, so that

I can have this one other way

along with every other way,

to know that I am here.

David Whyte seems to convey what every photographer must come to appreciate and understand in order to make compelling images: it is the light that provides the mood and context in a photograph. It’s not everything, in my opinion, but it is a critical element in every successful image.”

This image is also featured in the exhibit. For more information on that, please see the prior blog post.