Forest therapy.

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."

John Muir

It's a Friday afternoon. Things are piling up on your desk, your last vacation seems like a former life, and your facial tics keep better time than your watch.

What to do? Well, you could slave away all weekend to catch up on work and then pay your therapist $100 an hour to diagnose acute overworked-underpaid-stress syndrome and prescribe some it's-okay-to-be-not-okay rehab. Or you could cut out the middleman and head off to the woods.

With his biophilia hypothesis, Edward O. Wilson suggests that we humans have a genetic basis for our love of nature. And yet all too often it is a long-distance relationship. Our on-line world full of deadlines, traffic jams, and sterile environments provides little to satisfy this most basic human need. After two million years of evolution in nature, we now have little contact with the natural world that designed and nurtured us.

We need the tonic of wildness, wrote Thoreau in 1854. That was before cars, computers, phones, and urban sprawl with its mountains of concrete, plastic, and steel. Today we desperately need the tonic of wildness.

This is especially true for the readers (and the editors) of this magazine and everyone else involved in the protection of trees and forests. To paraphrase Edward Abbey, we mustn't spend all our time working and fighting for the natural world - we must get out there and enjoy it as well. That immersion, after all, is what inspires us to save it.

John Muir said that if the wilderness is to be saved, the people must come to love it. That means they must experience it. Muir followed his own advice, spending weeks and even months at a time in the wild lands he worked so hard to protect.

To be effective conservationists, we have to periodically recharge by reacquainting ourselves with the aesthetic qualities of trees and forests. How long has it been since you were intoxicated by the fresh smells of a forest after a gentle spring rain? When were you last lullabyed by the whispering of pines? Or dazzled by sunlight filtering through autumn leaves, turning each into a stained-glass masterpiece? If the roughness of oak bark, the sweetness of forest-scented air, the sounds of silence, or the simple beauty of a leaf are but dim memories, then you are long overdue.

You are human. It is your right to experience these things often.

The wilderness is too far away, you say, or you have only one afternoon free. Piffle. Splendor awaits in minute proportions, says Edward Wilson. Take a walk from wherever you sit, and you will find natural wonders enough to inspire and soothe your spirit.

A professor once told his class excitedly of the incredible discoveries he had made during a week of exploring. When a student asked where this amazing place was, the prof replied, "Half of my backyard. And next week I plan to explore the other half!"

Nature's beauty runs deep. Look closely, listen intently, breathe deeply, touch everything.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot, wrote Aldo Leopold. Because you are reading this magazine, you probably belong Go the latter category. But you also probably spend the vast majority of your time in your home, office, or car - each a variation on the theme of a box: a confined space with a controlled environment and little life.

It's not that you can't see the forest for the trees; it's that you can't see the forest or the trees. Get out of your box. Frequently. Now, in fact, would be good.

PHOTOJOURNALIST WHIT BRONAUGH - of Washington State often follows his own advice. His photos and features on champion trees will grace the upcoming winter issue.