May 01, 2025

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How Nature Heals

Early 2023 was a tough time for Taylor MacMahon. The 21-yearold college student says she was "strug- gling with some intense anxiety and depression, which led to physical health issues as well." So MacMahon decided to seek help from a doctor. The diagnosis she received--chronic anxiety--wasn't much of a surprise. But the treatment her doctor prescribed was"She literally told me to `go touch grass,'" MacMahon recalls, quoting a popular internet meme meant to poke gentle fun at people so caught up in their online world that they forget the real world exists. MacMahon laughed, but her doctor was being serious. "She told me the next time I was obsessing over a worry, to stop what I was doing, go outside, take my shoes off and put my feet in the grass. She said it would be therapeutic." MacMahon was skeptical at first, but she decided to follow her doctor's advice and was surprised to discover how well--and quickly--it worked. Simply being outdoors short-circuited her anxiety. "I immediately felt more calm and relaxed," MacMahon saysSo when one of her professors suggested she enroll in a summer course called Nature Immersion and Human Well-Being, she jumped at the opportunity. For one week at Colorado State University's mountain campus, she experienced all kinds of healing through activities in nature, from hiking to swimming to climbing trees to sitting around the campfire"I learnt not just that nature works as a cure for mental and physical problems, but how and why it works," she says. "That week was life changing. It felt magical." MacMahon's experience aligns with a growing trend in medicine: doctors prescribing time in nature to their patients to address a wide variety of physical and mental health concerns. These `nature prescriptions' aren't just feel-good recommendations; they're evidence-based interventions backed by science. And they're becoming increasingly popular for just the reason MacMahon said: They workScott Kaiser, MD, a board-certified geriatrician and director of geriatric cognitive health at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute, is one of these doctors. He says he frequently uses nature prescriptions to help his patients mentally and physically"Nature has a profound impact on healthy ageing and overall well-being," he explains. "There are several factors in

My Motorbike, My Freedom

For as long as I can remember, I always understood that riding a motorbike was the beginning of a journey from which you never return, even when you put your feet back on the ground. On a bike you must keep moving forward. Because if you stop, you fall off. This is probably one definition of freedomBefore this, though, is the first feeling of freedom: the bicycle. I remember my first bicycle so clearly, its colour a `racing' red. I must have ridden thousands of kilometres, must have invented a hundred stages of my own personal Tour de France. Cycling is, first and foremost, a form of wandering that gives free rein to your imagination. Every time I crossed the avenue of plane trees that led to the village square of my childhood, my bicycle allowed me to experience fantasized sprints amid cheers of an enthusiastic public. And it was under these same plane trees when, a few years later, on an icy morning in this small Provençal village, my grandfather Louis gave me my first mopedIt was an orange 103 Peugeot, recovered in a dump, and which Grandpa Louis had repaired himself. The expression on my face when I saw