Cultivating Attentiveness with the Seasonal Spiral as Manifested by the Forest
By Zoë Koivu
I began my session of the skills sharing workshop in September 2025 by reminding the group of my daily forest walking practice of ‘attuning with’, a way of being with the forest that I have honed over years of daily walking with the shoreline forest outside my front door in Rovaniemi, Lapland. It is a form of passionate immersion with photography, and practicing with proximity, that is, with physical and emotional closeness with the forest. It is an ongoing journey along the seasonal spiral of the eight seasons of Lapland as manifested by the forest.
Wanting to hear the input of my fellow talented and creative forest communicators, I raised the question of visual poetry: Does poetry need to be composed in words or can a scene or a photograph be poetry? If not poetry, then what could it be called? Do I experience poetry as I sit with the sublime and bask in beauty with the Forest? Can photos be considered visual poetry?
For me, photography is a way of attending to and expressing an instant in time and exploring noticings and themes during and after taking a photograph. Upon opening my senses to my surroundings, the finding, framing and focus of photographing helps me to absorb features of the day, the multispecies community, beauty, energies, and the awe and mystery that accompany me on my journey along the seasonal spiral.
For instance, encounters with Glances of Beauty (GoB), where a momentary sight of splendour grabs my attention and leaves me wondering whether it is gazing at me or vice versa. I suspect it is both: a relational encounter. This may personify the sight or the natural world, which while not sitting well with our rational Western thinking, intuitively feels right. And why not? It leads to the question: What if? For instance: What if we live as if encounters of beauty, intrigue and magnificence are reciprocal?
Another way of attuning with forest surroundings is to look closely by directing attention with bare eyes and other senses but also by using a wi-fi microscope lens. It aids in noticing details, discovering different perspectives and encountering beings that would otherwise go unnoticed by me. It can lead to experiences of the mundane becoming magnificent, like the vibrant colours and patterns on a common ripening bilberry bottom, the tiny spirit-being living in the twinflower, or even the luminous leaves of autumnal fireweed:
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Furthermore, directing focus towards minutia offers a deep insight into the plurality of life in the oneness of the forest ecosystem, which was the theme of my series of three picture books created for the GSF exhibition in Summer 2025: Vibrance: Scintillating Colours of the Forest; Intrigue: Wonders of InterBeing; and Resonance: Sublime Glances of Beauty.
I suggest that cultivating attentiveness with the seasonal spiral as manifested by the forest can lead to a greater appreciation of the splendour of the natural world and to observations and insights reminding us of our primordial relational embeddedness within the cosmos.
