nature kid

Cultivating Mental Health with Nature

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Looking up into the branches of a large tree. The leaves are bright green and the sunlight filters through them.

Reaching out my hand and touching the tree’s bark, I tried to look at it with fresh eyes. I ran my hand along it, taking in its rough, bumpy nature. I spotted a small bee buzzing around the tree’s base and an ant crawling up it. I looked up into its leafy canopy through which bits of sunshine filtered through. The leaves were still green, not yet starting to shade to their fall yellow. Closing my eyes, I envisioned the vast system of fungi that links its roots to those of other trees.

Then I heard what sounded like a wolf’s howl. But it wasn’t a wolf – it was the leader of the forest therapy session I was engaging in at a Climate Grief and Hope Retreat at ThorpeWood, a center devoted to using nature to support mental health and social-emotional learning. 

We were doing an exercise called “Meet a Being” – which could be a tree or any other type of being. Coming out of the activity, I felt calmer, more at peace and looking with more wonder at everything around me. As I had gone into the retreat on the verge of burnout (again), this shift was sorely needed. Later in the retreat, we participated in an exercise that linked the principles of permaculture – an approach to sustainability based on Indigenous principles that is about working with nature rather than against it – to our own mental health.

From this experience and my own life, I’ve found some ways to use nature to improve mental and emotional health. Without these, I would have suffered burnout much earlier and more severely. These days, with the stress of everything going on, we can all use some healing and relief. (I actually wrote this sentence pre-Election Day. Little did I know. Ugh.)

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Allowing Wonder to Overcome Fear

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment
A view up at the dark blue night sky with stars through dark trees

The sky was dark and smattered with stars. The Big Dipper shone out, bright and prominent. I stood on the campground road, looking up, my mouth partly open as if I was about to say something but then stopped in surprise. I watched the sky for a few minutes and then walked up the road to our campsite, my flashlight off. I gazed upwards every few moments, trying to cement the sight into my memory.

As I reached the campsite, my kids were getting ready to walk to the bathroom. “Keep your flashlight off!” I recommended. “You’ll see the stars so much better.” They hesitated, then turned them off, trusting me and the desire to see that beauty themselves.

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Eating our way through our local plants

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A white hand (mine) holding mulberries

As I ran, mulberries bounced out of my hand, trailing behind me as if I was some sort of fruit-based Hansel and Gretel. I paused in my run to pick mulberries from a neighbor’s tree – they littered the sidewalk, so they weren’t going to be missed – and had overestimated how many I could hold while jogging. Bringing them home, I announced, “Mulberries!” and dropped them in a plastic bowl. My older son ate them quickly, staining his mouth dark purple.

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How environmental activities can help neurodivergent kids

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A children's bicycle with a blue bag on the handlebars and a five-headed stuffed dragon in the bag
My younger son’s bike, complete with a monster companion

Feet pushing confidently on his pedals, riding his bike in loops around the park, I see the stress melt away from my older son. I’ve described it as moving meditation for him. He’s an emotionally intense kid, but other forms of meditation just didn’t meet his needs. They were often too quiet or too still. Biking fulfilled that need to move, his body in sync with his mind and everything else.

I know my kid isn’t the only neurodivergent kid for whom biking helps. (For those not familiar, neurodivergent refers to any person whose brain doesn’t match the “typical” brain. It includes autistic people, people with ADHD, people with depression, anxiety, dyslexia, and more.) In fact, there are many environmentally friendly activities that can help kids (and adults) with some of the challenges that come with being neurodivergent. Even if you and your kids are neurotypical, these activities have many of the same benefits. This is actually what much of my book is about!

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Battling Climate Grief and Anxiety as a Parent

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A photo of an oak tree with bright red leaves against a bright blue sky

As I tend to tell it, my environmentalism started with grief and anger, at the young age of 10. I visited Homasassa Springs State Park and saw manatees for the first time. Their huge size and gentle nature enchanted me. As I watched them, my parents had to nudge me insistently to get me to leave. The same day, reading the informational signs, I learned that they were terribly endangered. I signed up for the Save the Manatees club that day and told everyone I could get to listen to me about it.

But in reality, my environmentalism started years before that.

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Looking Closely at What Surrounds Us

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A snail partly buried in the sand with a gray and peach shell

Skittering across the mud, a tiny hermit crab lunged at invisible-to-me prey. A few inches away, a crab with its shell covered in algae started digging. Caddisfly tubes made of rocks and shell bits poked up all around.

As I was observing this tiny tableau, I felt something on my foot. Something very much alive, moving, and animal-like.

“Ah, ah, ah!” I yelped, reaching down and trying to get it off. I spotted a long translucent creature and flicked it, only to have it hop up and land elsewhere on my leg. I finally got it off, much to my relief. As it turned out, it was an itty bitty shrimp and the shallow water extending to the horizon was full of them. I ended up with them in my shoes a couple more times that afternoon.

Despite my panic about having shrimp in my shoes, the low tide flats of Breakwater Beach in Cape Cod offered an awesome opportunity to look at nature up-close – really close. It was easy to miss the vast, wriggling diversity of life in the shallow water and sand unless you looked carefully. Once you did start looking, it was everywhere.

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Building Character Whether We Want to or Not

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Photo of a tiny orange newt on the bark of a fallen log with moss

“I swear, this hike felt a lot easier when I was 15,” I said to my kids, huffing as we hauled up what seemed like the endlessly steep mountain.

I had promised an “easy, fun, not that long” hike. I was right that it wasn’t that long. What I had forgotten was that it was nearly straight up, complete with patches of steep, smooth rock. It had rained the night before, making everything slippery as hell.

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When you find magic in a tree

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Gazing up into the leaves of a large Princess Tree (yes, that is the species!) against a bright blue sky

There are some trees you see and you just know they’re magical. They’re magical like you can sit easily in them on a summer day reading a book, on a branch that’s just the right height. They’re magical like you could swear you saw a fairy in the hole *right there*. They’re magical like you can just see the squirrels chasing each other up and down them, even if they aren’t there that moment. They’re magical in that you can feel the years in them, the memories and secrets of place they have stored. They’re magical like childhood.

This tree was just outside the used book sale tent of the Friends of the Library at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. Books + trees = joy. Obviously magical.

The life lessons gardening is teaching my children

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Our roaming, sprawling cherry tomato plants from last summer, growing all into and over our netting-based fence with a pink plastic flamingo in the background

“Can you water your garlic?” I asked my younger son, referring to the elephant garlic we planted in our garden. He loves elephants, so of course we had to plant an elephant plant.

“Sure!” he replied.

Now, did he actually water it? Well, no. He tried, but the rain barrel was out of water and then he got distracted.

Thankfully, the garden isn’t school and watering is not homework. But there is much my kids will learn from it, above and beyond the practical skills that go into planting and cultivating seeds. These lessons are drawn from my own experience, but also heavily influenced from broader points I’ve picked up from the books Braiding Sweetgrass and Lessons from Plants. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.”

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