Tag: Forest bathing

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Sourwood Forest Seeking Residents for 2025

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Sourwood Forest in Western Amherst County, Virginia inspires through direct experience in nature, fostering curiosity, artistic expression, and wellbeing. We are currently seeking writers for residencies of varying lengths from mid May through late September 2025 (flexible dates and rates, with priority given to long stays). Visual artists who work with natural materials and need little indoor space are also welcome. Interested? For more info and to begin planning your residency, fill out this Google form: Sourwood Forest Application 2025

You’ll share a spacious home on sixty acres of untrailed forest, where the nearest human neighbor is half a mile away. Residents each have a private bedroom, share a bathroom with up to 2 other residents, and have free use of the house’s main kitchen, communal spaces, yard and gardens. For more details, see Frequently Asked Questions about Sourwood Forest.

Here’s how Patricia Wallbertson, a visual artist resident in June of 2024, describes the place:
“The house itself was lovingly built. Smooth trunks of trees made up the support beams of the house, rocks lined a wall with an inbuilt stove, and everything glowed with natural light. The windows looked out onto the garden, and at any given time I could see a vignette of flittering butterflies on a bush, nesting wrens in a flower pot, or wily squirrels trying a bird feeder. At the turn of the day to the evening, more hummingbirds than I personally have ever seen in one place whizzed around the back porch to … Read the rest

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What matters most?

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“What matters most?” is a question I ask myself frequently, as I choose and rearrange priorities for how to spend my time, daily, hour by hour. Even minute by minute. It has taken sixty years for me to recognize this question’s power and necessity in my life. And I’m only just beginning to see how slippery its answers can be.

The green snake was what mattered most one hot September afternoon. What you don’t see here are all the videos I took of him (or her) moving along the top of a rusty wire mesh fence between the backyard and the pasture, swaying and flexing a neon-green muscle of a body into an unusual number of curves while moving along the top of the thin wire. I only see this kind of snake in our yard once or twice a year. Every time seems like the first and makes me feel lucky. I could not read the creature’s eyes to figure out what mattered most to him (or her), but I was hoping that by keeping my distance, the answer wasn’t “avoiding me.”

After a super-dry late summer, one deluge of a couple inches brought a brief respite in late September, inspiring the autumn crocuses to bloom like crazy. They are actually in the narcissus tribe and not a crocus at all, but regardless of their name, they mattered most when I saw a small bumble bee buzzing and pushing into a bloom. I remembered Betsy B., the woman who … Read the rest

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Precious Bugs

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It’s the time of year when spider webs waft through the air from impossible heights in the oddest of places and often capture falling leaves along the way. Of course there is a spider somewhere responsible for each of these, but what I see is a magic leaf, seeming to hang and dance but not fall, held in the air by an invisible tether. I saw two of these instances today, in very different places, so I took a picture of the second–a sourwood leaf suspended above our road. Because this September the webs I’ve run into have been few and far between.

I had to remove a very scary spider from my room before I went to bed last night (not pictured). This one was of the wolf variety. Not a web-maker. More of a marauding hunter. It was tricky to get at it with the empty yogurt container (my bug removal device of choice) both because it was near the corner of the wall and because I had to move a floor lamp to reach him, which I did as carefully as I could, praying he wouldn’t move. Just a foot or so from him was a crevice he could easily hide in, between painted cinderblock wall and concrete floor (no baseboards in this room). And I had to crouch and reach without throwing a shadow across him. Slap of plastic onto wall then scrape of cardboard square sliding between plastic and wall, and he was with me … Read the rest

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Wood Thrush

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I stop my rapid steps to listen:

Chattering pip-pips like laughter,

Soaring songs a hallelujah chorus from angels not created in our image.

The woodthrush fills the woods with more than sound,

a tangible presence invisible inside the dark forest made darker by the backlight of sunset.

Their melodies carry magic.

They help me breathe,

help me lift my arms and spread myself,

tilt my chin and look up,

forget what keeps me in my head.

The barking of faraway dogs disappears

as does the memory of the machine cutting hay this afternoon.

Gradually the pip-pips cease,

songs grow long pauses between,

the forest quiets into twilight.

And I am a body simply standing in the road.… Read the rest

A Place to Connect, Create, Inspire

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Sourwood Forest in Western Amherst County, Virginia inspires through direct experience in nature, fostering curiosity, artistic expression, and wellbeing. The spacious home is on sixty acres of untrailed forest, where the nearest human neighbor is a mile away. For more information and to apply for a residency, see these links:Resident info for 2025

… Read the rest

A Cool May at Sourwood Forest

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I was tempted to draft this post on the back porch, but Mr. Wren, whose partner is nesting in the potted coleus plant nearby, stood not four feet from my chair and scolded me. The nest is holding five eggs that are getting very close to hatching.

May brought so many cool mornings, like in the old days. And today, June 1, the cool seems even more precious. That’s why I headed out first thing, with my tea cup in hand, to be in the woods at the time of birdsong and deep shadow. I’m working on a loop trail that could be used all summer, something Sourwood Forest doesn’t have. My husband and I like our woods to feel unpeopled, and trails make the presence of people palpable even when no people are there. But I think the benefits of this trail for artists who will visit Sourwood Forest justify it.

On May 6, artist Siobhan Byrns (University of Lynchburg) and poet Grant Kittrell (Randolph College) generously gave their time on a Saturday to lead an art-in-the-woods event.

Sioban had prepared materials for everyone, including specially dyed paper that, when activated by UV rays from sun, imprinted likenesses of whatever materials were captured between sunlight and paper. As we wandered into Sourwood Forest to choose our materials and create our images, we focused on the richly detailed diversity making up the decaying duff of the forest floor and delighted in the patterns of new leaves on every living plant. … Read the rest

What is Sourwood Forest?

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It is the name I’ve given to a part of the woods on the property where I have lived with my husband Scott since 1992. Large Beech, various Oaks and White Pines form the highest canopy and a diversity of other beings make up the rest, from high above our heads to down deep into the forest floor duff. Sourwood Forest is the part of our woods where you’ll find a couple of meditation benches in places we love to visit from season to season. It is where we walk and wonder at how the forest is growing more engaging as it ages, where we recognize how fortunate we are that our property happens to be home to a diverse natural community of beings living and thriving because we don’t interfere. All logging stopped here in the late 1970s. The only trees felled in Sourwood Forest since then are the pines that are now part of our house. I named Sourwood Forest after the tree species who has become my favorite. Sourwoods are mid canopy species. They have subtle beauty to offer at every season, from their lovely bark, arching trunks, and delicate flower sprays to their glorious range of fall colors.

The Mission of Sourwood Forest is to encourage creative inquiry and artistic expression in connection with nature, but in a larger sense, it’s about helping people envision the changes humans must make in order for any of us to survive anywhere. Art, in the largest sense of … Read the rest

Pedlar River Institute’s Sourwood Forest Residency Program Begins!

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Charcoal sketching in Sourwood Forest, May 9, 2022

Nature offered us a perfect spring day for the opening celebration of Sourwood Forest’s first artist residency week! Thirteen people went into the forest to draw using charcoal pencils made from the trees that grow there. Judy Strang, Christine Forni (multidisciplinary artist) and Amy Eisner (poet and teacher) collaborated to create an event where guests were treated to poetry, group conversation, refreshments, and a chance to try their hands at sketching in the woods. Everyone left energized, having been nurtured by the forest and by each other.

Charcoal pencils Christine made of Beech and Sourwood twigs harvested from Sourwood Forest

The opening celebration forecasted what future half or full day workshops may include: a mix of art making, poetry, reflection, and environmental understanding. Event leaders Judy, Christine and Amy had first met when they were residents at Vermont Studio Center in June of 2017. Even then, Judy was speaking of her desire to host artists at her house, but it wasn’t until late in 2021 that the three began to talk about the start of Sourwood Forest: it would be marked by Christine and Amy coming to Judy’s place as the first “residents” for what Judy was calling “an experimental week.” When Judy indicated she’d like to host a public event as part of that week, Christine described her “drawing you outside” (see her instagram #drawingyououtside for more information). Christine offered to make charcoal pencils from trees in Sourwood Forest ahead of … Read the rest

In Praise of February

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It’s about to start again—spring, I mean, in all its frantic frenzy. The birds have begun singing courting songs in the mornings despite the birdbath water being solid frozen. Daffodil buds may be shut tight, but their stems grew two inches earlier this week, when we had one of those weirdly warm nights in the midst of what has been a graciously, seasonally cold six weeks. 

Before spring springs, I want to honor winter, praise the quiet glory of the winter woods, a time of shapely silhouettes, of shiny, silent stillness. What inspired me to write was the walk Scott and I took a week ago to the skunk cabbage realm, guessing that there might be blooms. They grow in an out-of-the-way bit of bottomland spreading out from a small stream that runs through a forest on a neighbor’s land. All the way there, the forest floor was a smooth orange-brown mottled mat of frozen leaves. It was unusually pressed down and uniform because of the extended snow cover in January, which had melted and refrozen several times before disappearing altogether a few days ago. It was a look we remembered from another decade, a more wintery look than we’ve witnessed in years.

On our skunk cabbage walk, we enjoyed a beautifully open, mostly frozen February forest. Being a creature that listens to day length more than temperature, the cabbage plants had already pushed up their hooded-alien-head blooms in the thawed places of the bog. It was exciting to try … Read the rest