Here’s the list of books I read over the course of my training to become a certified Forest Therapy Guide, including a quote from each book that stood out in my reading.

🌲 You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited and introduced by Ada Limon

i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with.
i didn’t ask. i never learned. or even wondered (about their names).
(their families) (their longings) i only dreamed of (me)
climbing onto their shoulders.
(Jose Olivarez, “You Must Be Present,” pg. 29)

🌲 Old Growth: The Best Writing about Trees from Orion magazine

How could our hearts be large enough for heaven if they are not large enough for earth?  The only country I am certain of is the one here below.  The only paradise I know is the one lit by our everyday sun, this land of difficult love, shot through with shadow.  The place where we learn this love, if we learn it at all, shimmers behind every new place we inhabit. 
(Scott Russell Sanders, “Buckeye,” pg. 120)

🌲 Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels

Just as intimacy is necessary if we are going to forge close bonds with friends and lovers, it is also necessary if we hope to bond with nature and our place.  As one learns to see the history of a local landscape, a deep level of intimacy with place can develop. (pg. 7)

🌲 Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants by Monica Gagliano

Because stories are never just stories, the stories we tell come to describe the way we shape and move in the world.  Of course, we can choose whatever story we want, but given that stories frame what beliefs we elect to embody and which path we choose to walk on for our become as individuals and society, shouldn’t we be extremely observant and mindful of the stories we tell and subscribe to? (pg. 105)

🌲 Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

Mother Trees connect the forest.  This Mother Tree was the central hub that the saplings and seedlings nested around, with threads of different fungal species, of different colors and weights, linking them, layer upon layer, in a strong complex web.  I pulled out a pencil and notebook.  I made a map: Mothers Trees, saplings, seedlings.  Lines sketched between them.  Emerging from my drawing was a pattern like a neural network, like the neurons in our brain, with some nodes more highly linked than others.  Holy smokes.  (pg. 228)

🌲 Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Many indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird’s gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift. Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? And how shall we use it?

🌲 Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World by John O’Donohue

I also think that trees are incredible presences. There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life, between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and grows down at once and produces enough branches to incarnate its wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself—it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one seamless kind of movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.

🌲 The Hidden Life of Trees: The Illustrated Edition by Peter Wohlleben

A tree is not a forest.  On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate.  It is at the mercy of wind and weather.  But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of hot and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity.  And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old.  To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what.  If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. (pg. 12)

🌲 Speak with the Earth and It Will Teach You: A Field Guide to the Bible by Daniel Cooperrider 

The Bible begins with the Tree of Knowledge and ends with the Tree of Life, and with more references to trees than to any other aspect of creation besides humans, trees loom like an old growth forest over the tangled undergrowth of scripture.  Perhaps this is because trees are the earth element in its most generative, most sublime design and expression.  Perhaps this is because we’ve long understood that trees have what we long for: patience, longevity, generativity, abundance, community and kinship, resilience. (pg. 98)

Photos by Rev. Lauren Ostrout.