Nature is cool. We all know this, right?It’s easy to forget when you live in a city. We are creatures among creatures and yet, for most of my life I couldn’t imagine living outside a city. I’d even disparage pets or animals in the home. ”Ick,” I’d say. “They go outside barefoot.”
Even as every inherent sense reminds us that we need nature, the best I used to manage was an annual picnic on my birthday (February, when Delhi’s air and weather are perfect).
It’s different now. Moving away from the city = nature is no longer just keeping my house plant alive. Which is why I’m keeping this edition short and sweet. Y’know, too much blue light is bad for your brain. Get up and go outside.
There are cycles and seasons within us. We don’t exist in a forever spring, or an eternal monsoon. It’s in nature, and in our nature, to change and flourish and also, to decay. But in many ways our lives demand an endless summer.
Recently I’ve been thinking about fallow periods, essential in nature for soil restoration. Essential also in us, surely, these times of retreat and recovery?
Adulthood brings with it its own set of stresses and sorrows; they might range in severity from fatigued and fed-up to all the Really Bad Stuff, but the wild thing is that through it all we hold ourselves to this impossible standard — to keep doing the work, to show up in meetings as though nothing’s amiss, a bit like like expecting trees to bear fruit every day of the year.
To be fair most people cannot take this time. A lucky few have flexible work or resources that allow them to press pause for a beat, but for most the press of the world is relentless. As is the need to remain in service to life and families.
You’ve probably heard of shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of ‘forest bathing’. It’s the best-known and most-studied example of nature’s impact on the individual. If you haven’t heard of it you must be living under a rock - nice!
As its name suggests, forest bathing refers to heading into a, what else, forest, and then allowing that to help you rest, to renew. So far, so simple, as long as there’s a forest around obviously, and multiple studies attest significant effects on physiology including reduced stress, lowered blood pressure and elevation of immunity.
At various points over the last month I’ve looked to nature when my human-ness has proved lacking. Few things have given me as much joy as long walks with the dogs, even as mornings have turned from crisp to scorching. It’s their wholehearted PRESENCE that I am in thrall of, whether peacefully marching around the countryside and sniffing flowers or galloping wildly over the hills of Vagator and making a beeline for cowdung (what ensues when they reach the dung is much less peaceful but oh well).
As Annie Dillard put it, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. I don’t know any of us that will handle all life’s obstacles with poise and equilibrium, but for now I’m taking nature’s cue in at least meeting mine with integrity, honesty, and presence.
I’ve been thinking about lotus flowers recently, a recurring symbol in many regions and mythologies. In Egypt they represent fertility and rebirth. In Hinduism and Buddhism, enlightenment. ‘No mud, no lotus,’ Thich Nhat Hanh said. Without grit, there is no pearl.
In Homer’s The Odyssey, the lotus eaters were so obsessed with divinity that they lost touch with reality. Is this us? As the wellness industries have blossomed, they’ve also perfectly intersected with capitalism’s peak PUSH energy. Even in self ‘care’ practices it’s like I think I have to earn my rest, or that movement isn’t really ‘doing it’ if there isn’t copious sweat/push involved.
I started doing aerial classes with Lara Saluja here in Goa, and it’s here that I’ve learned that ‘subtle’ practices don’t require any less strength or grit. Here I’m schooled in grace, in slowing wayyy down, and choosing presence over powering-through to develop a different, more grounded strength.
Aerial is a surprisingly democratic art form that is both wildly fun (when you actually manage to nail something) and wildly frustrating (all the times you do not), but it’s a wonderful amalgam of mind-body mastery and there’s no-one better equipped to coach you through this progression than Lara.
Lara’s bright, airy shala is in her home and is one of my favourite places to be. Don’t be deterred by her lithe form and elfin proportions. She is insanely strong. Her classes blend mobility and yoga with strength work, and then work on the rings and silks.
These are usually one-on-one so will likely be customised to what you need and where you’re at. I spent a lot of last year dodging the silks, but Lara’s been patient through all my whining, bleating, and pleas that I’m done, that my hands are tired, that, no, there’s no way I can do that… and gently forced me to do it anyway. When you do finally make it up there and do something hella circus, there is genuinely no feeling like it.
I feel like my aerial classes are helping build both strength and mobility and opening up tight bits that I assumed were just part of life’s natural progression. Turns out, not so much?
The practice has its own vocabulary, all foot locks and J hooks and Russian climbs and other things that jumbled into a mess in my head the first few months. My first inversion felt graceful as hell and I imagined that I looked like Lara had when she’d demo-ed the move, all athletic grace... until I caught sight of the red-faced creature with fringe standing straight up in the mirror. Today I will swing til my face is purple and it feels good. Comfortable. Liberating.
It is exhausting, it is exhilarating, and it is helping me build a sort of strength that just weight training alone didn’t. Supporting your own weight is strenuous, but unlike a pushup, when you’re doing it like this it feels like play.
Lara teaches yoga online and in-person, but her aerial classes are all in person at her shala in Goa. If you’d like to reach out, send her a message through her website or find her on Instagram .
Clouds, trees, sky, water, human beings: Everything's constantly shimmying and jiggling and waggling.
One of our problems, Watts said, is that we're "always trying to straighten things out. Be orderly," we command reality. "Be neat and composed and predictable." But reality never obeys. It's forever doing what it does best: flickering and fluctuating and flowing.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
