I wanted spiritual feelings, but I didn’t know what they felt like. I just knew that people said feeling spiritual gives one a sense of peace and I badly wanted that. I was a stressful, anxious person in need of rehabilitation.

Religion didn’t move me. Meditation, acupuncture and massage helped me physically, even mentally and emotionally, but no soulful feeing did I discover.

But my first time in a deep forest, in Huddart Park in San Mateo County, surrounded by huge Redwoods and Douglas Firs, I found what I was seeking: a feeling of peacefulness that I had never experienced.

I didn’t need to understand why I felt so good in the forest primeval; I just accepted that the forest was what I needed to feel calm and settled. But, after reading “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” I discovered what was going on. I had joined a nurturing family.

Author and forest ecologist Suzanna Simard reveals that trees living side by side for hundreds of years form a complex, social network fostering cooperation and even mutual defense. Mother Trees, says Simard, who was born and raised in the rain forests of British Columbia, are the hub of these networks, overseeing the forest as one big family.

Yes, the Mother Tree nurtures and protects its baby seedlings – and strangers and other species – by perceiving, relating, and communicating through an underground mycorrhizal (fungal) network.

Simard was motivated to do this research to help save forests from the free-to-grow logging industry policy, which took the old trees, causing widespread environmental devastation and preventing the forest from rejuvenating itself.

I don’t get to Huddart Park anymore, but I do regularly visit San Francisco’s Botanical Gardens. I sit on a bench In the Redwood Grove and soak in all the majestic beauty of the Redwoods. I reduce my anxiety and feel that everything is good in my world.

What’s your experience with nature? How does it affect you?