WHEN I WAS an ecosystem ecologist in my twenties, I meditated without knowing it.
I remember one of the first times I really felt the presence of the forest. A soft light filtered down through many layers of green. Rays emerged between towering Douglas fir and western red cedar, lighting scraggly vine maple and viburnum shrubs, down to a fallen old growth giant covered in moss. The ground was soft and spongy with hundreds of years of needles turning into soil beneath my boots.
Our group of fifteen graduate students was in a remote old-growth forest on the Olympic Peninsula, a temperate rain forest in the northwestern corner of Washington State. I tried to match the neat descriptions and diagrams in my ecology textbook with the