These are essays, fragments from the field, for those who feel the call to deepen, to linger, to look again at what we thought we knew and what we are learning to remember.
They are shaped by a few intertwined invitations:
to unlearn the logics that separate us from our kin — human and more-than-human, ecological and cultural;
to listen for the edges and ruptures of what colonial inheritances have called “nature,” “self,” “progress,” “care,” “wellness;”
to feel into the trembling places of belonging and repair.
I’m a learner of unlearning, of listening, and of relational repair. A long-term resident of Japan, walking with students and comrades through forests, fields, and conversations that refuse easy binaries and fixes.
I’m a scholar by vocation, a teacher by practice, and an uneasy ecotherapist by training. Each role ripples into the others, asking: where else can we learn to return?
The Time of Returning is not a map so much as a compass that points to what we might heed together:
the colonial lineages in the aesthetics of “forest bathing” and other curated spiritual traditions for global consumption;
the stories forests and their dwellers tell when we slow down enough to note them,
the unsettling, beautiful edge of ecological care without domination,
relational ways of teaching and writing that seek reciprocity over mastery.
What you’ll find here:
🌿 reflections on forests, kinship, and ecotherapy without pastoralism
❤️🩹 poetics of unlearning and repair
🍄🟫 pedagogies grounded in relation with the land
✨ invitations to feel with curiosity and reciprocal care
Who this is for:
❤️🩹 the thinkers, the feelers, the cultivators of relation;
✍🏽 the writers, the educators, the guests in conversation with Earth;
🐈⬛ the ones practicing slow curiosity rather than fast answers.
If you come here for perspectives that are quiet but insistent, rooted but fresh, uncertain but alive — welcome. You’re among companions.
Subscribe to stay with the conversation — and to keep returning. 🌱
