“Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”
In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are catalogues of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.
Forest Therapy, also known as “Shinrin-yoku,” refers to the practice of spending time in forested areas for the purpose of enhancing health, wellness, and happiness. The practice follows the general principle that it is beneficial to spend time bathing in the atmosphere of the forest. The Japanese words translate into English as “Forest Bathing.”
Picture a blind man probing his way with a cane. While he is alert to the feelings in the hand holding the cane, the crucial distinction may be defined by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves, but that he watches something else by way of them, that is, by keeping aware of them. He has a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in his hand, feelings which are merged into a focal awareness at the end of the cane, constituting two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive — "from awareness" and "focal awareness".
There is here a particularly interesting phenomenal transformation. The sensations of the cane on his hand (the surface of the cane as it touches the palm of his hand, etc.) are lost. Instead, he feels the end of the cane as it touches an object...If our blind man shifts his attention from the tip of his cane to his hand, the meaning on the end of the cane disappears.