There is a strange thing that almost everyone has felt. Step into a forest for ten minutes or so and your breathing slows itself, your shoulders drop, and whatever was tangled in your head suddenly thins out. You do not have to do anything at all, only be there.
In many places around the world people have observed and written this down. The Japanese have their own name for walking slowly in a forest, and from the nineteen eighties researchers there began looking into why a session in the woods makes people feel better. What we find worth saying is that people knew that feeling long before anyone could measure it.
Why we need a little forest, even living in the city
Most of our time now happens inside boxes. The house box, the car box, the lift box, the office box. Every surface is smooth, every edge is square, every light stands still. Our eyes and our noses both work in a world with very little variation.
The forest is the opposite. Bark is rough underhand, dry needles break under your feet, sunlight comes through the canopy and shifts with the wind, and the scent changes with every step: damper here, resin there, leaf mould further on. What we call feeling better comes mostly from that richness. Our brain is given a change of work, and a change of work is exactly what rest is.
So when we speak of bringing a little forest into the house, we are not speaking of copying a forest. Only of bringing in a few things with a real surface, a real scent, and a slight difference between one and the next.
A few very small ways
The easiest is to give your eyes a real surface to touch. A plain piece of wood on a shelf, a woven bamboo basket, a few pebbles brought back from a streambed, a small plant beside the window. These cost nothing much, and they do a great deal for a room of nothing but brick and glass.
The second is moving light. Open the curtains for the morning sun instead of switching on a lamp. In the evening use a low warm light rather than one even ceiling lamp. And if there is a candle in the room, that flame will be the only thing in your home that moves to no rule at all, like leaves stirring in the wind.
The third is scent. A candle jar with the direction of leaves and plants, a diffuser in the hallway, a length of cinnamon in the kitchen corner, a dish of orange peel drying by the window. Scent enters memory by a very short road, so it is the fastest way for an evening in a twelfth-floor apartment to bring back some afternoon at the edge of a forest.
We make candles, perfume and fragrant things for this reason. Our workshop is in Van Phuc craft village, while the root of every direction of scent lies in the small streams of Hoa Binh, where Cam grew up. Every piece that leaves the workshop carries a fragment of that place, and our wish is a simple one: that it touches one small thing in your day.
A few questions you often send us
Why does walking in a forest make people feel better
Because the forest gives the eyes, the nose and the ears a great many small changes, and being given a change of work like that is how the brain rests. Many places around the world have observed and written this down for a long time.
How do I bring the forest into a small apartment
Begin with a real surface such as wood or woven bamboo, add warm light for the evening, and one direction of scent from leaves and plants. Those three things already change the air of a room entirely.
What does ZUNGZA mean
ZUNGZA is read as Rung Gia, the old forest. That name says both where we stand and where we are turned towards.
Read more why we call ourselves Rung Gia, the story of Hoa Binh and the small stream, and the story of scent and memory.