Sign Up to be notified of upcoming Forest Bathing + Nature Therapy Sessions. I share about Forest and Nature Therapy, nature-based wellness, creative practices, and holistic well-being.
The case for experiencing the seasons 🍂
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Good Morning Reader! Somehow, here we are at the last weekend of August. I've been noticing little signs of the season beginning to shift lately, have you? September has always had a little “new year” feeling for me. All the back-to-school energy, fresh notebooks and PENCIL CASES (🤓 I have always loved a good pencil case). There's something about this point in the year that makes me pause, look around at where I am, and think about how I want to enter what's next. Lately, I've also been thinking about how easy it is to move from one season into the next without really experiencing the transition at all. Which brings me to this week's Field Note... 🌿 Field Notes on Why Nature WorksLast week I wrote about how repetition helps an experience become a practice. This week, I’ve been thinking about something else that happens when we return to nature regularly: we start to notice change over time. The seasons stop feeling like dates on a calendar and start becoming something you actually experience. Nature lets us experience time, not just keep track of it.Technically, we can put a date on autumn. The Autumn Equinox arrives September 22, when day and night are nearly equal. However, nature doesn't wait for a date on the calendar. The natural world gives us all kinds of cues that time is passing. We can see changes in daylight, feel shifts in temperature, hear different sounds, notice plants flowering and going to seed, birds arriving and leaving. I think that's something many of us miss when we spend so much of our lives indoors and looking at screens. Our environments stay relatively the same while the world outside is constantly changing. When we spend enough time outside to notice these small shifts, we get to participate in the season as it's happening, rather than suddenly looking up one day and wondering how it's October already. 🎃 🌿 This week's invitationGo outside somewhere familiar and look for three signs that the season is beginning to change. Don't worry about finding anything particularly beautiful or profound. Just notice what's different from a few weeks ago. What's blooming? What's finished blooming? What sounds different? Where is the light falling? What has appeared…or disappeared? See if you can notice autumn arriving before the calendar tells you it's here. And speaking of the Equinox... 🍂I've been planning something new that I'm really excited about. On September 22, I'm hosting an Autumn Equinox Celebration in Forest Park. We'll spend the evening Forest Bathing, marking the transition into autumn with a seasonal ritual, reflecting on what we're harvesting from summer and what we want to carry into fall, and gathering over autumn tea and snacks. It'll be a little more celebratory, a little more ritual, and yes... maybe a tiny bit woo. ✨😉 Subscriber early-bird tickets are $45 through September 6 (regularly $55), and registration is now open.
👉 And one more thing... 🍂I’m really excited about this one! I decided to make the new Equinox Celebration a special bonus for September Sundays in Nature. If you purchase the full 4-session September Sundays in Nature pass by September 6, I’m including your $45 ticket to the Autumn Equinox Celebration for FREE. And if you’ve already signed up for the full September series, you’re already in! The bonus is yours too. 💚 🙌 So your $99 September pass now gets you four Sunday mornings of Forest Bathing + Nature Therapy AND our special Equinox evening together on September 22.
September Sundays in Nature is a Forest Bathing series of four screen-free Sunday mornings in green spaces around St. Louis, with guided Forest Bathing + Nature Therapy, time to slow down, and a community choosing to begin the week outside together.
Whether I’ll be seeing a lot of you this September or our paths won’t cross until later this fall, I hope you find some time to notice the season changing around you. There’s so much happening out there when we remember to pay attention. In Peace and Presence, Explore: Upcoming Events | Book a Forest Bathing Session | Email Archives | About Jess |
Hi! I'm Jess
Sign Up to be notified of upcoming Forest Bathing + Nature Therapy Sessions. I share about Forest and Nature Therapy, nature-based wellness, creative practices, and holistic well-being.