don’t need to harvest your own; he said standard health-store
aromatherapy oils should do the job.
“What else do you recommend?” I asked the middle-aged man
with the bowl haircut.
Clearly, Li gets asked this a lot. He had a small list. “If you have
time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go
one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is
good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to
a quiet place. Near water is also good.”
I could see my morning walk back in D.C. transforming before my
eyes.
I COULDN’T HELP wondering, though, if having more data on how
nature changes our brains and immune cells would actually lure more
of us into the woods. We also know we’re supposed to eat more leafy
greens, but most of us don’t. The kale analogy is pretty apt, because it
turns out that even when we don’t like nature, such as during lousy
winter conditions, it ends up benefiting us. At least that’s what
University of Chicago professor Mark Berman found when research
subjects took walks in an arboretum during a blustery winter day. The
walkers didn’t enjoy themselves, but they still performed better on
tests measuring short-term memory and attention. We’ll learn more
about his work in the next chapter.
While the Japanese researchers understand our draw to nature,
many American ones seem preoccupied with our pull away from it,
our distractions, inertia and addictions. They want to know if resisting
that pull and turning toward nature can enhance our productivity.
Perhaps this cultural difference is what Miyazaki was explaining over
his plate of sting ray: oneness versus me-ness. Americans want to
know what can nature—that stuff over there— do for us? More
Beowulf than Basho, the Americans want to slay the dragon and get
back to the mead hall. They prefer to use delineated spurts of nature