When was the last time you lost yourself in a natural setting? What did you do there? How long did you feel better after you returned home?

You may have heard of the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” This strikes a deep chord with me. In an article in The Guardian by Harriet Sherwood (I’m chuckling about Sherwood Forest), “Getting Back to Nature: How Forest Bathing Can Make Us Feel Better,” she quotes Gary Evans of UK’s Forest Bathing Institute: “We move very slowly, touching the trees, looking at colours and patterns, and breathing deeply. We end up lying down under trees and looking up through the branches.”

When I require a refuge, when I experience a crack to the heart and need to go to ground, I head to the woods.

So does Grant Eastbrook in The Infinite Onion, a novel I wrote about a cranky man-child and an artist recluse who engage in a battle of barbs during a summer on Vashon, an island in Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington.

At first, Grant (the man-child) retreats to the woods out of necessity, but the greenery seeps under his skin like a salve, soothes his nerves, and wakes him to the idea of wanting more. For the first time in years, his gaze turns upward, a lift of the chin to remember space and sky.

The island woodland setting of The Infinite Onion arose from the eight years I lived on Vashon Island, followed some years later by two years on Gabriola Island in British Columbia, plus other island experiences. Over the hours, days, miles (kilometers) walked on those islands, I wrestled with woes and forgot time in shifts of shadows and the lull of nature. I touched the island woods to find a home inside, to make space for love. And I did.

When the character of Grant Eastbrook came to the page and needed a way to heal, woods rose in welcome.

In Grant’s words, “The music of rain on leaves was all I needed. I tried to minimize the sound of my footsteps, to hear more of the swish and swell of leaves in the breeze.”

Whether or not you’ve read The Infinite Onion, I wanted to share a few of my island woodland photos with you. There are no story spoilers here, only a wish to showcase an environment so special to me I crafted a novel around it. If you’ve read the novel, I hope you’ll image Grant and the other characters in these photos.

Deep within the Vashon forest, Grant discovers Oliver Rossi, a snooty artist who irritates Grant from the start.

“Whatever creative shit Oliver did for a living, if his lifestyle was the result, I wanted the opposite of creativity. I wanted streamlined and spare. Minimalist and austere. Not a chaos of stoves, throw pillows that mated and multiplied, indecipherable lawn sculptures, and nowhere easy for the eye to land.”

After writing Everyday History, a story in which the main characters never don’t like each other, I wanted to try a story of dissonance. A natural setting gave the conflict between the characters space to breathe (my original title for this story was A Breath of Fresh Air).

I grew up in tune with the natural world. We often lived in the country, and my brother and I were allowed to roam at will to pursue long adventures in the woods.

My father always knew the names of the trees. Mom taught me and my brother to pick up litter and leave nothing behind. Both parents taught us to honor the earth as worth preserving.

I often do my honoring with a camera, to capture, remember, and share the feelings I experience in nature of peace, joy, beauty, and hope.

I also share important feelings using the medium of story. Writing requires me to be present and receptive, a state also found when wandering in nature.

Stories live. They exist independently of us. They take up space, teach us, heal our wounds. Woods and stories have a lot in common.

In 1993, after my poetic mother, Nancy Dunn Lawrence, visited me on Vashon Island, she sent me a letter from her house in western North Carolina, with this poem:

Haiku for Alice

Fog transforms southern
valleys into still, grey Sound,
and brings you closer.

Soft grey sky rav’ling
over dark green mountains, a
Vashon sort of day.

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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more.

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