Spending time in nature, or incorporating nature into your daily life, can provide incredible benefits and health benefits, both mentally and physically. Growing food or flowers and herbs, moving and exercising outdoors, being around animals, or just lying in the grass or wandering around in the forest. My mood rises, heavy thoughts lighten, stress is reduced, and I definitely feel that I am more in place within myself, more in balance.
Nature provides me with the best ingredients for food, drink, skin, hair and well-being. Nothing stimulates all my senses like nature does.
I try to be in nature as much as possible, even though there is too little of it at the moment (sharpen me), and I love filling my lungs with the fresh air, taking in the many different and delicious scents, listening to sounds, looking around with an alert gaze, just being here and now.
For stress, for movement, fitness, strength, and for stimulation, for my soul, my heart, for my hunger for learning and presence. And last but not least, I, and we all throughout the world, need nature for recreation, nourishment, rest, play, and social experiences.
Here in Voss, nature embraces us no matter where we are, it is visible everywhere, and there is hardly a window here in Voss that does not have a view of a natural scene. This equips us to live good and happy lives. Lucky are we who live in Norway, close to nature! That is what Noha, my Egyptian friend, says. I will tell you more about her further down.
We all have the intuitive feeling that being in nature does us good, this is something only we know. We have experienced it ourselves, and then we have heard stories about friends or family who have had concrete health benefits from taking a walk in the mountains or in the forest. The stress after a long day at work disappeared, the headache dissolved, the irritation over something small or large was replaced by new ideas with every step that sank just a little into the wet moss or the rugged mountain terrain. We have felt our backs loosen from a stiff computer back to a supple forest back as rocks and roots were gradually overcome, and heavy thoughts have risen and dissolved like the morning mist on fine autumn days.
This intuitive knowledge of ours about the health benefits of nature is also the subject of much research. There are a large number of studies that confirm and concretize what we have always known: nature has enormous health benefits, both mentally, emotionally and physically. Do we need to hear this from scientists too, something that is so obvious? I think it is important for everyone to be reminded of it, no matter how lucky we are with where we live.
I, who live in paradise, truly paradise, have in recent months lost the good routines I used to have, of going for walks every single day up in my healing cultural landscapes, forests and mountains. I just have to work a little more and a little more, and then it's lunchtime, and training work and kids and then it's evening and a little more work.... Anyone recognize themselves? It's not just easy to make it happen, even when you live in the middle of it. Because that's what I do, I live as much in the middle of nature as possible.
Complete without negative side effects, only positive effects on body, soul and mind. Oh the sheer number of different types of ailments that nature has fixed, balanced and helped me with: strong grief for mom and dad who died so young, anxiety and emptiness and other psychological issues that come along and put you more or less out of your element, sore hips and back, poor fitness and ten thousand other things. And peace of mind! From the smells, the colors, the lights, and not least the sounds of nature. Streams, waterfalls, the creaking of spruce trees in the wind, the bees humming in beautiful flowers, the deer's rutting roar in the evenings, the owls that I can talk to from my yard and get answers from, the fox that barks outside my bedroom window...
Yes, the sounds of nature have also been researched, and it has been found, just as I experience, good effects on stress, among other things. In Japan, they conducted a study in 2013 in which they investigated the extent to which sounds from nature had similar effects as visual experiences in nature. The researchers at Nippon Medical School also compared the effects of taking a walk in the forest with walking in the city. They found that “forest bathing”, as they called it, led to a decrease in stress hormones, but also that the immune system’s soldier cells increased and thus became better equipped to fight against potential illness.
Noha, my Egyptian friend from the big city of Cairo, made an audio recording of our steps in fresh snow on Volafjellet. She couldn't help it, the sound had to come back to Cairo. The sound and sight of waterfalls, of moss with a thin layer of frost that cracked as your foot sank in, murmuring streams, blades of grass swaying in the wind...
Noha was on two types of heart medication when she arrived here, she had also been given sleeping pills since she had not slept properly for months, and she had been told that she would have to take these medications for the rest of her life. 35 years old and chained to the pill boxes. When she arrived here she was depressed, sad, tired and with little energy. She had terrible experiences from five years of revolution in Egypt in her luggage, and strong experiences where she was part of rescue groups that rescued surrounded women exposed to sexual harassment by gangs of hundreds of men. She has seen friends die, she has experienced paralysis after the police gassed the protesters with far stronger substances than tear gas. She, together with her sisters in Cairo, has had black menstrual blood for months after the police gassed protesters. Noha had lost her spark and joy.
Then Noha came to Norway. She saw the forest for the first time, and on her first day in Voss she had to run into the forest after our cows on a pasture, she who had never seen a forest, a path, and certainly not walked on roots and forest floor. After the initial shock, more and more energy came, something happened little by little.
Nature fixed Noha. Nature replaced the pillboxes. Nature made Noha healthy and gave her back her glow, spark and joy. Nature balanced Noha, even when a green-clad hunter came trudging down the path with his rifle over his shoulder, and Noha's heart sank because she thought it was the military (which she is used to being more scary to encounter in Egypt than in Norway..).
Lucky me who often has to go out to harvest what nature so generously provides. Today it will be a trip in the snow and up into the forest to harvest fantastic juniper for our forest soap. Together with juniper in the bag, I will also have less stress, more peace of mind, more sense of closure, better movement in the body and a little stronger muscles and fitness!
Will you come out with me?
