Why I Moved to the Redwoods

Beauty and nature as psychological needs

Arcata Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary, photo by author

Yesterday I took our dog, Lupin, for a walk around the neighborhood. It was a gray, misty afternoon, the August air humid. We passed the park and wound around a corner to the end of our block, where our suburban neighborhood ends and the cow fields begin. Here, in the Arcata Bottoms, flat green fields stretch out into the distance, all the way to the coastal dunes and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

We stopped to watch the cows, grazing peacefully on yellow-green grass. One or two of them looked up at us as they chewed their cud. Lupin is fascinated by the cows. I looked out west, toward the ocean, then south, to Humboldt Bay, then back east, towards town and the redwood forest beyond. Every day, I am grateful to live in this place, and a little incredulous that we get to.

For years, after moving away from Humboldt County, I dreamed of moving back. I mean “dreamed” literally and nocturnally. I had these dreams where I would be moving back to town, sometimes to my old college apartment. The atmosphere would be somehow numinous, like it was filled with golden light, the trees, flowers, and old Victorian houses radiating otherworldly beauty. But then I would realize I had to be back at work in the city on Monday, or I would wake up to the darkness of my bedroom.

What was it that kept drawing me back here?

It seems simple to say, “basic” even, but I felt a deep longing for the beauty of nature. Those are words that would have been capitalized back in the 19th century: “Beauty” and “Nature,” because they were still believed to have some kind of intrinsic value. In our present age, we tend to see them as luxuries, at best—something nice, but not something necessary. Let alone something as vital to the soul as air is to the body.

It’s been nine months, now, since we moved. I didn’t even realize, until we did, how much better I would feel. In San Diego, among the dry, brown hills, the freeways and tract homes, I felt this constant thirst for beauty, and a kind of depressive weight at the lack of it. (I know some people find San Diego beautiful; I won’t argue with them. Even though I grew up there, it never did it for me). To borrow a phrase from Yeats, I needed “the waters and the wild,” deep green forests, bubbling streams, wetlands and wildflowers.

In his book The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, psychologist James Hillman wrote about aisthesis, the Greek word referring to our ability to perceive, feel, and understand through the senses. It’s the root of our modern field of aesthetics, the study of beauty, art, and “taste.” Walking with Lupin in the Bottoms, I remembered something Hillman wrote about aisthesis as a kind of involuntary intake of breath, the “ah” feeling we experience when we encounter Beauty out in the wild.

We know our human brains evolved to experience beauty in nature. What if this experience was a psychological need, something as essential as the vitamin D we get from sunlight?

I ignored this need in myself for years. Not everyone will need leave the city and move to a small town in the forest to fulfill it (and cities can be beautiful, too). But I write this in case there are others out there, like me, who deeply crave this experience of beauty and who might benefit from having it validated as a real psychological need, one that deserves to be taken seriously.