In the midst of life challenges, can nature be our anchor and a place to rejuvenate the soul?

Listen to Klaudia's latest conversation with Ben Goldsmith of finding comfort and solace in nature.

Ben Goldsmith us the author of God Is An Octopus: Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature (Bloomsbury Publishing), which is out now.

Klaudia Mitura: Hello happiness seekers. Welcome to this month's happiness challenge where I'll be exploring how to find comfort and strength in nature. And helping me with this topic is Ben Goldsmith, the author of God Is An Octopus: Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature published by Bloomsbury, which is out now. And in this episode, Ben is going to share his story of finding solace in nature after suffering loss.

Welcome, Ben.

Ben Goldsmith: Thank you very much for having me, Klaudia. I'm really grateful to be with you.

Klaudia Mitura: Ben, I read your book and it is very emotionally moving book. And I guess for me, the reason for that is it really touches that feeling of loss that we experience in life, unfortunately on various occasions.

But for those listeners that haven't had a chance to read your excellent book yet, can you tell us the story that you share in the book?

And as anyone who suffered the loss of a child or any loss really of that kind can attest, the darkness that engulfs you is unimaginable. It's the kind of darkness that you wonder if you can ever survive. Almost immediately you begin thinking, how am I going to survive this, especially if you have a life full of commitments, I have other children, I have a young wife, I have a family that needs me, a family that loves me and that I love very much.

And I remember thinking, how am I going to learn how to live with this? So after losing Iris, I went through the kind of year of magical thinking that will be well known to anyone who has lost someone close to them, a year of searching for an ongoing trace of my daughter.

I'd never really considered such questions as what happens when we die? Is there some kind of ongoing existence after death? Do we have a soul? Is there some grand plan of some kind? These are things that had never played a role in my life previously. And I searched with real fervour, at least for a year, for answers to some of these questions.

And I also found that the first cracks of light, which shone through the darkness for me were found in the presence of nature. We have a pond on the bend of a river down in the valley near where the farm is. And I can just walk down the hill and I can strip off my clothes and jump in there and swim.

And it's really a beautiful place. The sun is always on that pond and it's full of life and butterflies and birds and it's surrounded by different flowers at different kinds of times of the year. I found really important and meaningful solace and comfort in that pond, swimming there, and also just generally in nature.

I found that this was a way to make myself feel okay for a short period of time. And so the book really describes a kind of year of magical thinking, a year of searching some of these kinds of questions and a year of finding once again, how to live but by spending time closely immersed in nature.

No, I'd always been fascinated with wildlife and nature as a child. And I always assumed this is kind of an important hobby for me. And I realized during that year when I really needed it, that nature held me in a way that was more than just a hobby. This was a calling; it was a much deeper, more visceral connection that I found.

So I've come to the view that we have a need on a number of different levels to be close with nature. And I think that we don't understand much of why that is. We don't really understand the nature of our connection, but it's real. And I guess the thing I tell people now, when I come across people who are hurting people who are suffering in fact, the message I give to everyone I speak to about this is spend time in nature.

Find a way to spend time in nature as often as you can, even better if you can participate in the healing of nature. Get involved in volunteering, tree planting, river restoration. I was with a group this morning and steered marshes in the Somerset coast near Bridgewater, where a large number of people have been involved in restoring a huge coastal salt marsh, and it's just paradise.

And those people, they burn with life. And they look so happy, you know? And I think that spending time in nature and being involved in the restoration and the stewardship of nature is really at the root of how we find meaning and joy in life.

Klaudia Mitura: Thank you so much. So as you say, this is the book is the story of your journey of finding the strength and comfort in the nature.

One thing that really touched me when I was reading the book was the idea that you were searching for those comforting thoughts around the loss. And one of them was that Iris had a good life. And I think I personally feel it's so important that people live in our memories and the stories we share.

So my question to you is, what's one of your favourite memories of Iris that you could share with us.

Ben Goldsmith: I mean, I have so many, of course, and many of them are memories of time spent in nature; times swimming in a torrential rainstorm in the sea, looking for birds’ nests when she was very little and finding beautiful blue eggs and the look of amazement on her face.

I just have so many memories of that kind with Iris and with my other children. I think I have a little video on my phone, which I visit quite often, which makes me feel happy. And when Iris was about nine or ten years old, and she had her first iPhone, and she found herself with her pony in a field here in Somerset, and there was a huge flock of starlings in the field.

And she climbed from her horse and ran over with her phone, and she filmed, she looks on the video. She says, look, dad, the video is for me. Look how many there are. I'll go and make them go up. And she ran to them, and these starlings just lift up off the grass. Lots of them a huge flock and they form like a genie shape, swirling above her. She said, look isn't that amazing dad, look at them go I was so close to them they were right by me. And that video makes me so happy because it reminds me of the love and the awe that she felt for the natural world.

And I'm glad that she felt that because I think it's so important, a part of being alive is feeling a sense of awe and love for the world around us. And I think many people go through their lives without really connecting with that sense. So the memory of receiving that video and the fact that I can switch on my phone and watch that video now is a source of joy for me, I once found myself alone with a scientist called Professor Lord Martin Rees, he's the Astronomer Royal, one of the most senior scientists in the discipline of physics in this country. And I remember his words of comfort to me and in the aftermath of losing Iris was that the view of many quantum physicists is that time really is just an illusion, , a deeply persistent one, but it's an illusion that we feel as living beings in the world.

And what he described is this idea that everything is actually in the present moment in the kind of reality outside of time and space. In other words, what he said is if you cultivate a pretty garden, was his anecdote, for a period of time, and then you eventually leave the garden, and it becomes overgrown, and it's finished.

Well, outside of time and space, it's always there. It's somehow always there. And I think that if you remove the equation of time, and the idea that Iris only lived 15 and a half years, and other people live 80, 90 or 100 years, and you just consider the depth of feeling that was experienced during that lifetime, the amount of love, and the amount of joy, and the amount of awe, and the vibrancy with which that life was lived then the duration of the lifetime becomes something of an irrelevance. And that was a comforting notion to me.

Klaudia Mitura: Oh, that's beautiful, isn't it? That's truly beautiful because that looks at those moments, as you said, of joy, love and happiness.

In terms of your finding that solace in, in nature, in restoring nature, how can we reconnect more with nature?

Because I agree what you said earlier that sometimes we go through life, not really appreciating how important nature is to us. So yeah, so how can we reconnect with nature more often and find that strength and comfort when needed?

Ben Goldsmith: I think the lockdowns that were imposed by the government in response to the COVID pandemic, I think were a moment in time in which people of all walks of life were really forced to reflect upon their immediate surroundings and spend time in their own environment and to go looking for nature, , whether it was a particularly nice patch of wildflowers in the local park or birdsong alongside a railway siding or people were rooted for a time in their own place.

And I think that had a catalytic effect in producing this upwelling of love we're experiencing now, not just in Britain, but all over the world for nature. There's an enormous amount of interest in nature restoration now, like nothing I've ever seen in my lifetime. There's 10 times more people are now proactively seeking places in which to do wild swimming.

There's just a whole renaissance taking place in terms of connection with nature as a result of that time. It was one of the silver linings of what was otherwise a pretty crazy time. And I think one of the things that was exposed was this iniquity, especially in our country, in Britain, in terms of who has access to nature and who doesn't.

If you are either rich or rural, then you have pretty ready access to nature on your doorstep. Albeit nature in the countryside in this country is very significantly diminished compared to how our grandparents knew it. There's been terrible decline in abundance of wildlife and loss of colour and birdsong and so on, but there is still nature there, more or less around you.

And alongside the water courses. And there's a whole effort now to produce wildflower meadows on the flat roofs and some of the industrial parts of London and the way a network rail is running the land alongside the railway to create streaks and patches of wild nature through the very fabric of our city. There are even six large rewilding projects now taking shape around London, Enfield and Hainault and Dagenham and other places, Croydon.

So I think it's exciting that London is showing how you can bring nature back to where people live. We need to bring nature right into the places where we live. And we need to make sure that everyone, almost as a matter of right, has access to nature where they live. And I think this is hugely important.

But that being said, people should be encouraged to go out and find it. There's more than you think; go and find a little rough spot of land near where you live. Go and find that area that is not tended to, that has hawthorn scrub and has berries in the autumn and go and sit there and quietly reflect.

And very quickly, you'll start to notice wildlife gathering around you. David Attenborough says it takes 10 minutes, 10 minutes of quiet and stillness, and the wildlife will forget you're there. Now, whether it's little grasshoppers on the ground, or whether it's the birds hopping around near you; just find that patch of nature because London is 25 percent green already. There's plenty of space.

In Japan, they formalized it. In Japan you now have forest bathing. You go to see a doctor from a mental illness, or you go for the depression or a whole range of different physical ailments, and they will give you a prescription to spend time in nature, forest bathing.

They understand that time spent in nature is really a key to happiness. And we don't really understand why, but the science of it is revealing itself to us here and there. So we now know that trees in the forest produced volatile organic compounds, that when we breathe them in, they lower our heart rate, they lower our blood pressure, they make us feel happy.

Why? We don't know why. Why do the trees communicate with us in that way? Do the trees love us? Why not? We don't know what the nature is of our connection with the rest of nature, but for sure there is a connection and it's hugely beneficial. And so I think people should be encouraged to find nature.

And I think governments should be encouraged to invest in nature to a much, much greater degree.

Klaudia Mitura: Yeah, I completely agree. And especially the fact that we live in central London and I'm very proud of my urban garden with over a hundred plants on my rooftop. Just because I needed to find nature, as you said, during that lockdown, when access to nature was so limited for Londoners.

So I think yeah, absolutely agree with that. And on one of the podcasts, I was interviewing Dr. Lucy Dey who actually is fighting for that green prescription. So I'm really waiting for a time when yes, I will go to doctor and what will get prescribed to me is time in nature or engagement with nature.

So I think we are on a very, very positive path there, but there is so much more that we can be doing as you're saying in terms of a nature restoration, especially when we currently in this very difficult climate crisis time. So my question to you as an environmentalist is.

How do you deal with eco anxiety, Ben?

Ben Goldsmith: Yeah, the science is scary. It's happening as they predicted, only faster. And I think there's a very real chance that we are in big trouble. And it's astonishing to me that there's still a significant minority of people who are consumed by conspiracy theorists and the climate change isn't happening, that this is a hoax, and it’s sort of ironic in a way that those people are effectively campaigning for the right of a small group of very large global corporations to continue trashing the planet.

And yet they talk about vested interests, and they talk about conspiracies. Well, if there's any conspiracy, it's the largest corporations in fossil fuels and in logging and so on who are behind it. So I find that really depressing that there are people out there that are slowing down action to solve this problem. And I find the scale of change really frightening.

And so of course I suffer from anxiety, and I guess I find solace in two places. Firstly, I find great joy and meaning in the restoration of nature around me. Participating at the local level in restoring the fabric of nature is deeply rewarding and provides great joy, no matter how bleak the bigger picture looks.

So here in South Somerset I'm part of a cluster of farmers and landowners who are restoring the great wood pasture of Selwood. So we're doing rewilding here. The beavers have been reintroduced and they're working their magic along the bottom of the valley. We have glowworms back. They were not reintroduced, but we find that glowworms thrive in an environment engineered by beavers.

There are wild boar acting as gardeners of the forest. We have a growing cohort of neighbours who are switching to a wilder way of management, and we have like an inkblot of expanding wildness in this part of South Somerset, which is just the most joyful thing I've ever participated in in my life.

I go walking with my kids, my wife, and there's never a day where we don't see something new and experience some new beauty. And the seasons turn, and we have huge flocks of mixed finches in the winter feeding on the seeds of the docks and the thistles, flocks like I've never seen before. And in the spring and early summer, the birdsong here is overwhelming.

You feel it right through your body, the volume of birdsong, it makes the rest of the countryside seem silent by comparison. So the way in which nature recovers so vigorously, so dramatically is very heartening and being part of it is a joyful thing. So I would urge people who feel eco anxiety like you and I do, to find a way to participate in local nature restoration where they live.

Find an organization with which they can volunteer if they're lucky enough to have some savings or they're lucky enough to have the ability to buy a little plot of land, then of course, then that's a tremendous blessing. And I have that privilege myself that I've been able to buy a little farm and start rewilding here, but just be in it and get active doing it.

And you'll feel better. The other place in which I find solace is this idea that some things are bigger than us. And there's only so much we can each individually do. And if you worry too much about the things which are far bigger than your ability to change them, then you'll ruin your life.

And billions of people pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, there's only so much I can do about that. If the world is going to choke on greenhouse gases and heat up irrecoverably, then, well, I did my best here locally. I can't do more than that. And maybe that's part of the grand plan.

Maybe nature on this planet is meant to blossom and then wither and then blossom again and then wither. Maybe that's the way it's meant to be. I believe that we're part of a grand mystery, which is beyond our ability to understand. And I take great comfort in the idea that that there are some things we must just surrender to, and we do what we can and beyond that we surrender and so I do that, but I can't deny to you I do feel often very anxious, especially recently, especially this summer.

Klaudia Mitura: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's very tricky sometimes balancing what we hear about it, what we see in the media. And then, as you said, thinking that we have that control and sometimes it is maybe saying, okay, I'm doing my best and the rest we will just have to see.

Ben Goldsmith: And by doing your best, I mean, obviously there is the being responsible, recycling the waste, being mindful about how you spend your money, being thoughtful and engaged in the way you exercise your democratic right to vote. Being a member of an environmental organization, even better if you're a paid-up supporter, those things are very important.

But the most meaningful thing you can do if you want to feel better, feel happier is to engage yourself in the actual restoration of nature. Get your hands dirty in it. That is really great.

Klaudia Mitura: And that's a very practical action that myself and listeners can take on as part of this happiness challenge.

I think that is, that is something, anyone can go in and go for that. And as this is a podcast about happiness, Ben, I'm just curious, what makes you happy?

Ben Goldsmith: I mean, I think that the, the principal categories of things which make me happy, I would say first and foremost is the love that I share with those around me and my children, my family, my closest friends. And since losing my daughter, I feel a much greater respect for life and a much greater sense of gratitude for what I have. I count my blessings every day. So I think really appreciating in the present moment, love that we share with those around us, I think is very important in our happiness. I think second, as we've discussed on the podcast is immersion in nature, participation in nature, stewardship, nature restoration, these are very important elements. The great psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, sort of summed up his life's work with the comment that the key to happiness is spending a few hours each week engaged in growing your own potatoes, with your hands in the soil.

So I think being involved in nature in a physical way is a very important element. And I think also feeling a sense of gratitude in and taking joy from the small pleasures that God has given us. A steaming cup of coffee on a cold, sunny morning, a delicious dinner prepared by your husband or wife, or someone else, the sun on your face, the physical pleasures of life, we too often forget them. Especially during difficult times, a cup of tea can work wonders. I'm English, it matters to me a lot. A cup of tea made right. But I think small pleasures are very important and are there to be appreciated and valued.

Klaudia Mitura: So that's what we most miss, isn't it? When things pass by, it's those small, ordinary moments in life, isn't it? I often think about that when missing my home. That's what I think about the small, ordinary moments I had with my family, but went back when I was living in Poland.

Ben Goldsmith: Exactly. Those small pleasures are very important to happiness and a very important part of life. And I think one of the reasons why they're important is because they're about appreciating the now. I think so often when our mind is stuck thinking about events in the past, we're worried and anxious and feeling regret or feeling disappointment. And when we think about the future, it often brings a feeling of anxiety or worry. And I think more often than not, when you reflect in a focused way upon the now, this cup of tea tastes good. The sun is lovely on my face right now. That child is making me laugh right now.

I think that is a very obvious place in which to find pretty reliably a sense of happiness, much more reliably than in thoughts of the past or thoughts of the future. And I think this is why a lot of the Eastern traditions teach us to be, just be, and to be in the now. And I think that's something that's important.

It's a really important concept, I think, in the search for happiness.

Klaudia Mitura: I love that. And nature help us to be in the present moment because we're concentrating on all those senses, isn't it? It's such a sensory experience, listening, seeing, touching. So, ah, yes. Finding solace in nature.

Ben Goldsmith: Yeah, with all five senses occupied, it's been said to me that sometimes that is the best way to kick into life the sixth sense, and I think that we are innately interested in searching for patterns in everything we do.

And I think when you're in nature, you're subconsciously or consciously looking for patterns the whole time. And suddenly you start to see these myriad interactions between species and different things happening in these beautiful patterns. And I think that's why it's like a kind of music for us. And I think that's why it makes us feel good.

I think though, in the search for a greater connection with nature, individually and collectively, and in the search for a greater sense of inner peace and happiness, I think psychedelics have a very important role to play. And this is something that I had not experienced until I found myself in a state of deep grief. I was never one to experiment with or adventure in this way when I was younger, I was a bit square. And some people who I really respect, different people, my grief counsellor and one or two others suggested a psychedelic therapy as part of the healing process, and I did an ayahuasca experience over two nights, and this takes you to a different realm altogether. I mean physically, you're lying on the ground, you're under a blanket and your mind is very much in a place that feels a bit like sleep, but it brings a kind of lucid dreaming that is enormously illuminating in a way that is very hard to articulate in words, but which is profoundly beautiful and meaningful and comforting.

You can't imagine participating in a psychedelic experience and not emerging with a sense of mystery and grandeur and of a story that is beyond our comprehension, but which is fundamentally good and benevolent and meaningful. And don't know that I'll ever do such a thing again, but a year after I lost my daughter, this ayahuasca experience was, may be one of the most important experiences of my life.

And it's helped me a great deal and I go back to it in my mind, when I feel low, I think about the illumination, I think about the insights, which I gained during that experience, and they make me feel okay day to day. It's a place I visit in my mind on a regular basis. I think once might be enough though for my lifetime because it's no joke, this thing.

Klaudia Mitura: I have never done that one. I have done Conscious Connected Breathing, which also takes you into very specific emotional space when it comes to your sensory experiences. And I agree with you, you're creating your happy place inside and when things are really tough and overwhelming where we are it helps to go back to that feeling and sensation. But that's fascinating Ben, and I can see you are still on the journey. Never know what will happen in the future, I guess, with those experiences.

Ben Goldsmith: No, absolutely not. I think we're always on a journey and well, the book I wrote, I think has been an interesting part of my journey.

I never thought I'd write a book but it's I think it's been of help to people. I get a lot of messages in my Instagram and letters through the post and people send me books that they enjoyed, and it's opened up like, many, many new dialogues with people. And it's quite an interesting thing that I'm experiencing now, which is the thing of being an author, it's kind of back to reality in September, I think. I told Bloomsbury I would spend a month or two doing the things they wanted me to do. And now I'm back to normality in September.

Klaudia Mitura: Brilliant. But thank you so much for coming to the Happiness Challenge podcast and sharing your story so openly and transparently. I absolutely loved your book.

So again, thank you so much for writing it. And I think it has that positive impact on many, many people. Thank you so much again for agreeing to be my guest.

And so I've, I launched a podcast of my own called 'Rewilding the world with Ben Goldsmith, and it's available on all the platforms. And each episode is 30 minutes and tells the story of an exciting, optimistic, happy rewilding project from around the world. So I would encourage you to listen to those. ,

Klaudia Mitura: I love it. Especially that we are, we really do need positive news. That's what I'm always very search for. So thank you so much in terms of sharing your podcast and I'm waiting for wolves, moving to England. I come from Poland. Wolves are nothing, they are still there, and we would, I would love to see them in UK one day.

Ben Goldsmith: Well, of course we should have wolves back in Britain, of course, and there are no moral or rational arguments against the reintroduction of wolves to Britain, which is why it will happen. It's just a question of a consciousness shift is required and many of us are working on it.

Thank you so much, Klaudia.

Klaudia Mitura: Thank you so much.

Ben Goldsmith: Bye.