The fern bed

There is a small clearing in the woods behind the village where the ferns grow thick and waist-high, and at the edge of the clearing the ferns have been flattened, by years of small animal traffic, into a soft bowl about two metres across. The bowl has been there for as long as I have been walking these woods. I do not know what animal first made it. I do not see them when I am there.

I have, for the last three years, made the bowl the destination of my Sunday morning walk. I get there around nine, climb into the soft fern bed, and lie on my back for twenty minutes. The walk takes about twenty-five minutes each way. The whole practice is just over an hour. It is the most reliably restorative thing I do all week.

What twenty minutes in a fern bed does that twenty minutes on a yoga mat does not

The ferns hold the body more softly than any mat. The body sinks into them in a way that is not possible on a flat surface. The smell — ferny, slightly damp, slightly green — is itself a kind of sedative. The small light through the leaves above is constantly shifting. The sounds of the woods — wind in the upper branches, a bird, the small distant trickle of a stream — fill the silence in a way that no studio can.

There is also, and this matters more than I would have predicted, the fact that the lying down is being done in a specific natural place rather than in a room. The body, in a room, is the same body it always is. The body, in a fern bed in the woods, is a body that is briefly part of a larger thing. I cannot articulate this better than that. But the sense of being held by the woods, for twenty minutes, is qualitatively different from being held by the floor of the bedroom, and the difference is what the practice is.

On the small etiquette of using such a place

Lightly. I do not bring anything. I do not leave anything. The flattening of the ferns will recover quickly when I get up. The animal that uses the bowl, whichever animal it is, will come back to it tonight. The space is shared and unowned and the only thing I owe it is to use it without leaving a trace.

I have tried, a few times, to take a friend. The friend was kind about it. But the practice is, I think, an individual one — you have to be alone in the fern bed for the experience to do what it does. A second person changes the texture. The animals would not come. The ferns would not be soft in the same way. The practice would become a thing being demonstrated rather than a thing being done.

It is, in any case, a private practice. I am writing about it now because I have decided that twenty minutes in a fern bed on a Sunday morning is one of the most useful pieces of body wisdom I have, and it would be a small kindness to whoever reads this to suggest that they look for their own version. The fern bed will not be a fern bed for everyone. It will be a quiet corner of a park, or a flat rock by a lake, or a particular bench under a tree. The body, given a regular twenty minutes in a specific natural place, knows what to do with the gift.