breathing with the forest

see this gorgeous video here

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We imagine ourselves as sealed-off individuals, but we are inextricably embedded in a web of life. Our bodies are porous, suffused with the world around us, home to thousands of microscopic symbiotic inhabitants; with each breath, we exchange parts of ourselves with the wider world. Our connection with trees is particularly intimate—oxygen they exhale flows into our lungs and through our blood, coursing from the heart outward through fractal-like branching arteries to feed every cell in our bodies.

Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Inviting us to see inside its hidden pathways, this multimedia journey brings us into relationship with the rhythmic interchange of breath that keeps the forest—and us—alive. Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.

The rainforest is a place that dissolves the borders we construct around the self. When we look closely at the web of interconnected, symbiotic relationships sharing nutrients, light, and breath, we discover that our idea of separation between one being and the next is an illusion. In this interactive experience, digitized projections of oxygen and water vapor molecules traveling through the trees’ xylem and phloem and the subterranean mycorrhizal network are visualized in a five-second cycle—the average pace of a human breath. 

By synchronizing our breathing with these larger cyclical rhythms, we begin to feel the continuity between body and forest, expanding our sense of self to include the planet around us. This digital forest is a detailed recreation of a section of the Leticia region of the Amazon rainforest in the southernmost tip of Colombia along the Amazon river. This area is home to the Ticuna people, who inhabit the wider Leticia area alongside the Witoto, Inga, Tucano, and Nukak communities who have stewarded the land for thousands of years.

—Marshmallow Laser Feast

Emergence Magazine

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That which speech does not illumine, but which illumines speech: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be thought by mind, but by which, they say, mind is able to think: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eye is able to see: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be heard by the ear, but by which the ear is able to hear: know that alone to be Brahman, not this which people worship here.

That which cannot be breathed by the lungs, but by which breath is in–breathed: know that alone to be the Brahman, not this which people worship here.

—The Kena Upanishad

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a mystical geography

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This land was once completely forested, Dr. Alemayehu Wassie began—sweeping his arms across the surrounding countryside—so much so that nobody would have seen the church. It was all trees. Now almost all the old forests have been cut down. The only place where they are still protected are in church forests like this one. When the people here at Zajor decided to build their wall, he said, they were not bureaucratic, they just built a wall. He motioned to the elderly priest with the carved wooden staff and thanked him for initiating the project. Alemayehu hoped other priests would be inspired by this community’s example.

As we stood beside the wall, a stream of local parishioners came and went through the gate. This is what Alemayehu meant when he described the wall as “porous.” 

A group of children hopped on the wall and ran down its length to the west until they rounded the corner and were lost to sight. An elderly woman approached. She stopped beside the wall, crossed herself three times, then bowed low at the waist and began to fan her face with both hands, cupping the air and pulling it toward her, as if partaking of some invisible goodness that lay inside the wall. Then she rose and walked solemnly up the forest path. Clearly this was no mere border fence; it was an entrance into the sanctuary.

“Humans can come here any hour of the day to 

contemplate or pray or collect seeds.”

click for detail

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During the centuries when most people were illiterate, icons served to teach the biblical stories. The paintings, most from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, were made from natural dyes taken from local plants. Other than the tin roof and solar panels, all the materials for the church came from this place. In these icons was a forest transformed, the trees and roots and pollen all having passed through the fires of human imagination, while still retaining their sylvan imprint.

Perhaps I was witnessing more than gestures of devotion, important as they were. Maybe they were also the secret to conserving the forest, small acts that together with hundreds of other gestures like them formed an invisible shield around the forests of Zajor. As I would come to learn, this shield was embedded deep within the structures of belief that had survived here since the fourth century. Our Western conceptions of belief are almost entirely inward and private. Here, and at other points on my journey into these forests, I was witnessing the performance of a mystical geography, the soul’s journey to God made visible in the landscape.

“In our tradition, the church is like an ark. 

A shelter for every kind of creature and plant.”

from the splendid essay by Fred Bahnson,

The Church Forests of Ethiopia, at Emergence Magazine

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more magic

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