I try to get outside and enjoy the fresh air every day, but there’s a difference between “walking around my neighborhood, which is in the middle of a city” and “a deep dive into nature.” The more often I do the latter, the better I feel.

I want a term for my “intense experiences with nature.” For several years, I have thought of it as a “nature bomb” but I don’t like the violence of that word. There’s nothing violent about communing with the world’s splendor.

There is the term “forest bathing” but I enjoy nature in all her forms: the beach, with her salty air and crashing waves; the desert, with expanses of sand and rock, still teeming with life; a botanical garden, with rows of rose bushes and cacti gardens; and even the farm that my kids love to visit, with fields of strawberries and baby goats. I adore trees and I love to wander in the woods. Heck, I fell in love with my alma mater Dartmouth because it was surrounded by woods, but I don’t want to limit my nature sessions to the forest bathing.

I’ve been playing around with Word Hippo and considering alternate phrases:

• Nature bath: I like the word “bath” because it’s cleansing and it does feel like nature washes the slime of city life away from my soul, but I don’t like this phrase because it seems passive. I don’t just want to soak in a tub of nature. I want to move around, explore, and engage my senses.
• Nature infusion: sort of medicinal, which emphasizes how vital nature is to the soul. But nature is poetic, and I don’t want to reduce it to a clinical practice.
• Soaking: Back to water, but this makes it sound like some fringe sexual practice

Perhaps I do not need a phrase for this practice. Perhaps that’s why so many people feel moved by nature to write poetry: you can’t boil the communing down to a phrase, or even a lyric, but pages and pages to let your wonder unspool and embrace the glory of mountains, sky and trees.

Pithy phrase of not, I want to fill my life with as much nature as possible. That’s why this morning, I headed to the Arboretum to take my morning walk. I saw peacocks, squirrels, turtles, butterflies, and one rabbit hopping into the underbrush. I wore my headphones for awhile, listening to music, but eventually I discarded them so I could listen to the birds, my footsteps on dirt paths, and the wind in the branches. There was still the noise of city life – an occasional helicopter or a gardener armed with a leaf blower – but I felt restored by my time communing with nature.

Here are some ways I hope to include “intense experiences with nature” in my life during the next few months:

• Regular visits to the Arboretum after morning drop-off
• And I’d like to renew my membership at the Huntington Gardens and enjoy some walks there once the weather cools off a bit. (I’m so lucky to live in a city with easy access to so many botanical gardens!)
• My kids are probably going to have soccer practice near Descanso Gardens. Descanso is a bit too far for regular school days but if we are heading that way for soccer practice, perhaps we can fit in an hour of “forest bathing” as well.
• Visits to the beach – hopefully once more when it’s warm enough to boogie board, but I love the beach no matter the weather.
• Hikes into the San Gabriel Mountains, solo and with friends and family.
• A visit to Underwood Family Farm for their fall festival.

Whatever I call it, I’m so grateful for the healing power of nature.