Nature Connection and Collaboration – Insights from The Summit 2024
The Summit is a residential weekend providing outdoor community leaders who are focused on POC audiences the opportunity to share their knowledge, their lived experience and their outdoor activities with each other. Organised by All The Elements Founder Soraya Abdel-Hadi and Phil Young, founder of The Outsiders Project, the event is full of activities, important conversations and connections. The Summit is made possible by support from outdoor holiday cooperative HF Holidays and outdoor clothing brand Patagonia.
Now in its fourth year, the 2024 gathering took place on 31st May to 2nd June, and the first session of the weekend was a forest bathing walkshop. Co-curated by Chantelle Lindsey (a wildlife conservationist and presenter), Isabella McDonell (founder of Roots to Belonging and Xeno podcast) and Evie Muir (nature writer and founder of Peaks of Colour), each individual brought their own practices and personal experiences into the session as a whole.
Evie gives us an insight to what it was like to be in the session, where the inspiration came from and how the collaboration came together.
Everything feels possible on the first day of summer, and arriving into a sweltering hot Wales on a Friday afternoon, felt like taking a warm exhale. As a procession of cars with their windows down pulled up, we left the unseasonably dreary late-spring and our respective lives behind us. Peeling our layers as we introduced ourselves, we settled into the comfort of our new found family with ease. The 2024 cohort of The Summit had arrived in Dolgellau.
With a jam-packed weekend of adventures ahead of us, we quickly dumped our bags and set about on the first activity of the weekend, an interdisciplinary forest bathing walkshop, co-curated by Chantelle, whose love of nature could be traced back to her childhood adoration of more-than-human friends; Isabella, whose interests lie in interspecies ecologies, and myself, whose relationship with nature has always been defined by safety and healing.
Isabella McDonell, founder of Roots to Belonging and Xeno podcast, (right) was one of the facilitators of the walkshop.
Though Chantelle, Isabella and I had followed each other’s work for some time, this would be the first opportunity for us to collaborate. The potential for this was realised during a catch up between myself and The Summit co-founder, Soraya, when the Peaks of Colour walkshop model presented itself as a potential container that could hold and weave together our respective practices. This all fell into place seamlessly when we all met to plan the session over Zoom. It was here that “How to Become a Tree” was conceptualised, and before we knew it we were sitting in a clearing by a tumbling stream, sharing our vision with the wider group.
We were asked by Chantelle to think of our own childhood memories being in nature. As others shared and as I pondered my own, what struck me was how difficult it is to summarise your journey as a nature-lover. When tasked with doing so outside of the formulaic script of a professional bio, the symbiotic connections we feel are ethereal and otherworldly. They are rooted deep within youthful memories, embodied feelings, an electrifying wonder and awe. This heart-felt calling is what had brought us all together, convening through our mutual love and respect for the land.
Now firmly grounded into the forest floor, under Isabella’s guidance we began our journey through the woodland in silence, tuning into our senses and inhaling breaths of renewal. To ask a group of strangers-cum-acquaintances to exist in silence with each other upon first meeting feels unintuitive, but we abandoned our instincts and remained open to the process, allowing ourselves to greet the forest first. Meandering through the trees, the undulating river offered a rumbling sonic backdrop. After a while, a mossy enclave opened up to us, and as beams of sunlight shone through the canopies of beech trees, we perched upon the rocks and settled into our next workshop space.
Here I offered a free writing prompt inspired by How I Became a Tree, a book by Sumana Roy, and our walkshop’s namesake. I read an excerpt from the book, where Sumana writes:
“I had in frustration with industrial noise and human verbosity, mistaken trees for silent creatures [but] trees shared a natural sound with people. It is the sound of resistance - like protesters ‘raising their voice’, trees produced a sound that held in it their fight against wind, water, rain, to tearing, cutting and breaking… Revolution. Rebellion. Resistance. All other sounds were noise”. - Roy, S. How I Became A Tree, Yale University Press, New Haven: p 25
I then invited the group to respond to this using the prompt: In their language of resistance, the trees tell me… and as people shared what came to them, together we reflected on the intimacy we had just nurtured in the silence of the forest.
We continued our walk, heading up to the roadside before looping back and weaving down on the right of the river. We paused again, and this time Isabella offered a new forest bathing exercise. We were to find a tree and sit at its roots, facing it. She then guided us to scan our chosen tree from the ground up, and once we’d reached the top, to scan downwards, this time slower and more intentional, noticing anything we had missed the first time around. The tree that found me was a golden birch, with a moss covered bark and smooth, flat leaves. I became mesmerised by the way its branches wrapped around itself at right angles, like limbs reaching out to its neighbouring trees for a hug.
“To ask a group of strangers-cum-acquaintances to exist in silence with each other upon first meeting feels unintuitive, but we abandoned our instincts and remained open to the process, allowing ourselves to greet the forest first. “
With the group present and connected with our forest friends, Chantelle then offered us some playful activities that allowed us to extend our connection from the more-than-human to each other. The first, was called ‘Tree Blind Dating’. In pairs, one of us was instructed to close our eyes, and be led by our partner to a tree before being returned to our original location. We then had to open our eyes and find our tree, recalling memories and details such as how the terrain changed under our feet, to how the light penetrated our eyelids from different directions as we retraced our steps.
The second activity was called ‘Gifts from the Forest’, and had us in a different set of pairs. One of us was to find a comfortable seat, and rest there with our eyes closed whilst our partner went on a scavenger hunt, returning with a present from the land. Before revealing this offering to each other we were to explore the gift with senses other than sight, guessing what it could be before finding ourselves to be entirely wrong.
With this marking a soulful end to our walkshop, we then returned to our accommodation, predictably late for dinner with our gifts from the forest and hungry bellies in tow. On the stroll back, I felt overcome with the realisation that I was able to feel like a participant within a space that I was facilitating. It was a refreshing reminder that how we curate spaces is just as important as what we deliver, and that truly intuitive work doesn’t require our force or over-extension. When intuitively aligned, it is possible for collaborations to be built through a principle of ease. Though our ‘How To Become a Tree’ walkshop was perhaps an untraditional start to a residential or retreat, where often participants are offered time and space to get to know each other as a group first. This, I hope, was what Chantelle, Isabella and I still managed to facilitate. Only this time we also built an intentional intimacy with the land too, allowing our connection as a collective to flourish through the ways we related to the natural landscapes we inhabited.
Things you can do next:
Read Evie’s new book Radical Rest: Notes on Burnout, healing and Hopeful Futures
Find out more about the inspiration behind the session in Sumana Roy’s book How I Became A Tree
Find out more about the mission of The SUMMIT on the website.
Listen to Evie Muir talk about her work in an interview on the Black Earth podcast.
Spend some time with the trees.
The Summit is supported by Patagonia Europe and HF Holidays. Find out more at the-summit.uk.
All photos credited to Les Latchman.
