The Joy of Nature

There is a particular quality of light in the English countryside in early morning.

Not dramatic. Not the kind of light that announces itself. Just a slow, quiet arrival: pale gold coming over the fields, catching the dew on the grass, making the hedgerows look as though they've been very carefully painted by someone who had all the time in the world.

I walk in it most mornings. And most mornings, without fail, something in me that had quietly tightened overnight - some small knot of thought or worry or the residue of too many screens - simply releases.

I don't do anything to make this happen. I don't set an intention or open sacred space or call the directions. I just walk. And the land does the rest.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and about you - the people I work with, my clients, my fellow travellers on this path. Because I think nature is one of the most powerful and most underused medicines available to you. And I want to say something about it that goes beyond "spend time outdoors" - something more honest, more personal, and more grounded in what I actually know.

Where the ancients are buried

What the Land Around Me Has Taught Me

I live surrounded by ancient burial mounds. Long barrows, round barrows, the quiet, grassed-over presence of people who lived here thousands of years before I did, who loved this land, who were buried in it, who are, in some sense I find it difficult to articulate but impossible to dismiss, still here.

There are stone circles not far away. Standing stones that have been standing since before recorded history, placed with extraordinary care and precision by people who understood something about the relationship between earth, sky, and human consciousness that we are only now beginning to recover.

When I walk near these places, I feel something. I know that sounds vague. As a Cambridge researcher, vague is not usually something I'm comfortable with. But the honest truth is that the feeling is clearer than words. A sense of depth beneath the ordinary surface of things. A reminder that I am walking on layers - layers of time, layers of life, layers of people who stood exactly where I am standing and also looked out at the fields and also felt the morning light and also, I suspect, felt some version of what I feel: that this is real, and this is enough, and for this moment, the knot is gone.

The land is not a backdrop. It is a presence. And that presence, if you allow yourself to be genuinely in it rather than just moving through it, offers something that I have never found elsewhere.

What the Science Says About Nature (Because It Matters)

I want to take a moment here for the researcher in me, because I think the science is both fascinating and important - not as a replacement for direct experience, but as a validation of what people who have lived close to the land have always known.

The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, the simple act of being present in woodland, has been the subject of serious research for decades now. The findings are consistent and striking. Time in nature measurably reduces cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone. It lowers blood pressure and heart rate. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest-and-digest state, and quiets the sympathetic nervous system, the one that keeps us in low-grade fight-or-flight.

But it goes deeper than stress reduction. Researchers have found that exposure to natural environments increases activity in the parts of the brain associated with empathy, love, and what neuroscientists call "self-transcendence" - the sense of being connected to something larger than yourself. And it decreases activity in an area called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, which is specifically associated with rumination - the repetitive, self-focused negative thinking that underlies so much anxiety and depression.

In other words: nature doesn't just calm you down. It literally shifts the way your brain processes your own existence. It moves you out of the small, tight, anxious self and into something more open.

The shamanic traditions have been saying this for millennia. It's rather wonderful that the neuroscientists have caught up.

There is also something remarkable in the research on what scientists have called the "overview effect", which is the cognitive shift reported by astronauts when they see the Earth from space, the sudden, visceral understanding of interconnection and fragility and beauty. What's interesting is that spending extended time in wild nature produces measurably similar shifts in perspective, even without leaving the ground. The land can give you the overview effect. You just have to let it.

The Mounds Know Something

I want to come back to those burial mounds, because they mean something particular to me that I don't think I've ever quite put into words before.

When I sit near them, which I do regularly because they ask for it in a way I find difficult to explain, I am aware of time in a way that daily life doesn't usually permit. Not abstract time. Felt time. The specific, weight-bearing awareness that people have been doing this - loving the world, struggling with being alive, finding meaning in the land and the sky and each other - for an extraordinarily long time. Long before anyone invented the problems I'm worrying about. Long before the news cycle or the algorithm or the to-do list that somehow never gets shorter.

And something about that awareness is profoundly, unexpectedly comforting.

It's not that my concerns become trivial. It's that they become proportionate. They take their right size. I become my right size, not smaller in a diminishing way, but smaller in the way that a river is smaller than the sea it flows into. Still real. Still itself. But part of something so much larger that the largeness is what you feel, not the smallness.

The ancestors in those mounds - I don't speak for them, and I hold that with great care - but I do believe they are part of the living web. That the land holds them. That to walk in a landscape this old, this layered, this carefully tended by human beings across so many generations, is to be in relationship with something that has enormous continuity and enormous wisdom. Not because the stones speak, though sometimes, in the right state of consciousness, it genuinely feels as though they do, but because being in their presence reminds you that you are part of a story far older and far larger than your personal history.

That reminder is, I find, one of the most joyful things available to a human being.

What I Want for You

If you are working with me, or considering it, or simply reading this because something in you is searching, I want to say this as directly and warmly as I can.

Go outside.

Not to perform being in nature. Not to Instagram it or achieve it or use it as a backdrop for a mindfulness practice. Just go outside and be genuinely, attentively, receptively there.

Find a place that calls to you. And if you don't know what that means yet, look for the place you feel most like yourself. It might be woodland. It might be a hillside. It might be a stretch of river, or a particular field, or a hedgerow you walk past every day without really seeing. It might be somewhere ancient, if you're lucky enough to live near such a place. Or it might be surprisingly ordinary, like a park bench, a garden corner, a bit of scrubland that the developers haven't got to yet.

The land doesn't require grandeur to be generous. It just requires your attention.

Go there without your phone if you can manage it, or with it firmly in your pocket. Sit or walk. Let your senses do what your thinking mind usually drowns out. Just let yourself actually hear, actually smell, actually feel the temperature of the air and the texture of the ground. Let your eyes rest on something that isn't a screen. Let whatever you find there find you back.

And notice - really notice - what changes. In your body first, before your mind catches up. The loosening. The slowing. The quiet that is not empty but full, not absence but presence.

That is the land offering you something. Receive it.

One Last Thing

The burial mounds near me will be there long after I'm gone. The stone circles were standing before my grandparents' grandparents were born. The hedgerows in the morning light have been catching the dew in exactly this way for longer than anyone now alive can remember.

There is something in that continuity that I find not melancholy, but joyful. Deeply, quietly, almost embarrassingly joyful. The kind of joy that doesn't shout. The kind that sits with you on a damp hillside at eight in the morning and asks nothing except that you notice it's there.

That joy is available to you. It is not behind a paywall, or at the end of a qualification, or waiting for you to be healed enough or evolved enough or ready enough.

It is outside your door.

It has been waiting, with extraordinary patience, for you to come back to it.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner living and working in the English countryside, surrounded by ancient burial mounds and stone circles that never let me forget what matters. If this stirred something in you, I'd love to hear from you at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

Where is the place that makes you feel most like yourself? I'd genuinely love to know.