What Mother Nature Has to Offer Your Addled Brain
A Personal Perspective: Nature can feel like a maternal presence protecting you.
Posted November 20, 2025 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
I hadn’t yet encountered nature when I flew from NYC to visit my friend who had moved to Menlo Park in California. On the day after I arrived, she and some friends took me for hike in Humboldt Park, a nearby nature preserve. It sounded great, then there we were in this vast landscape with fields that went on forever and hills I couldn’t imagine ascending.
Of course, we were high. We were in our 20s. We were high a lot. That made things worse. My mind spun. What if I were to get a mile out and didn’t have the strength to get back? I’d never walked in nature. Why it was different from walking 30 blocks in the city? I didn’t know, but it was.
Note: Like Eloise, I am a city child. Queens, to be exact. Set down in any city and I made my way with nothing more than a folded paper map. No problem. I had a sense of cities. But nature? I still joke that we didn’t have nature in Queens.
When I started to shake with fear , the whole group, annoyed as hell, turned around, got back in the car, and took me home.
I didn’t have another foray into nature for years. But then I rented a little house in Northwest Connecticut for some quiet to write my first book and on those long lonely days when I needed some distraction I started to explore the nearby trails. There was nothing else to do. I was older by then, too, in my 30s, and determined to face my fears.
Little by little, with my dog Stanley at my heels, I inched up those trails. I had no idea where the trails would take me. I didn’t know what trees, bushes, or flowers I was looking at. I didn’t even have a water bottle. But I had my trusty paper trail map and just kept going. Remarkably, it was o-kay . Just.
Here’s the thing, though. As frightened as I’d been in such unfamiliar terrain previously, I was starting to feel comfortable; Stanley was, too, though you would have thought that little powder puff of a white Lhasa Apso wouldn’t have wanted to get his paws dusty. Once, when I got us lost, Stanley even led us back.
After a few months of this, I felt almost embraced by the landscape. I can’t tell you why, but a cartoon image of Mother Nature, emphasis on mother, kept coming to me. As if the landscape itself was nurturing and the trees were standing guard. The surrounding hills felt protective; when I mounted them and looked out at the vista, I felt like a child hoisted up in a parent’s arms to see the world at their level, if only for a moment or two.
The stillness was captivating. I couldn’t get over the way the mountains had been there centuries. And there I was among them. Very impressed. By the time I sat back down at my desk a couple of hours later, the answers to whatever I’d been trying to figure out would magically appear.
Surprise. After the rental was over and the book written, I kept wanting more. If I’d liked nature in the small, what would it be like in the large? By then I had built the muscles to find out. I was used to long walks. I had mastered the pace that kept me going. I was no longer afraid of not getting back.
Fortunately, I had a boyfriend (my future husband) who was willing to take hiking vacations. We’d just pick some random mountainous place, like Northern New Hampshire or Stanley, Idaho, find a B&B or a motel, and take day hikes there for a week. How we loved them. We’d press on even when we had to wait for a moose with giant antlers to move off the trail or figure out our way around a fallen boulder. Danger? What did we know?
Nature as a Necessity
By my 40s, I noticed that I hungered for nature if, for whatever reason, a sprained ankle or being city-bound for work, I couldn’t get away to hike. I realized I needed nature in my life—it was nature by then—the way I needed my dear friends, my morning coffee, sex , or love. A decade later, nature felt essential. And not, it seemed, just to me.
Spending time in nature to ground yourself was becoming common advice and “nature heals,” common wisdom . In Japan, “ forest bathing ” became a thing in the 1980s and by the early 2000s, the idea of “nature deficit disorder” was said to have launched a movement. I have found healing—and infinite pleasure—in nature, which I think will happen if you can find a place in nature that’s comfortable enough to let it sweep you into its arms. Whether that’s the Swiss Alps or a beach a few subway stops away, a canyon or a city park, it’s worth going, regularly. That place can soothe when anything upsetting happens or when there’s such excitement in your life, you can’t calm down. If you can cultivate a relationship with nature, it can be a refuge. It just might do with you what it’s done with me, a city child—bring me to the wonder at the center of itself and my own self as well.
"Forest bathing" - Dr. Qing Li, Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happieness, (Penguin Books), 2018.
"Nature deficit disorder," Dr. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-deficit Disorder , (Algonquin Books, 2005).
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Joan K. Peters, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at California State University at Channel Islands. Her new book is Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.