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Category: Forest spirituality

relating forests: Listening to the stories of European woodlands

relating forests: Listening to the stories of European woodlands

Published December 15, 2025 by Rahel Könen

By Marianne Cornil

What stories do forests tell us when we truly listen? What imaginaries emerge from the rustling of branches, from leaf-covered forest floors, from moss at the foot of ancient trees? The European project „relating forests,” co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme, brought together four artists through a consortium of three organizations: TheatreFragile (Germany), NOBA – Norwegian Bio Arts Arena (Norway), and Cultures Éco-Actives (France). Together, storyteller Anne Dromzee, choreographer Rebekka Sartre and mask theater makers Luzie Ackers and Marianne Cornil explored these questions through an interdisciplinary artistic approach rooted in local ecosystems and cultural mythologies.

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Re-spiritualizing forests… What in heaven does this mean?!

Re-spiritualizing forests… What in heaven does this mean?!

Published February 10, 2023 by Jeanne Roux

“In the forests are things you could lie in the moss for years pondering about.” (Franz Kafka) 

With this quotation from a famous local poet, we started our SINCERE project workshop in 2019 in the city of Prague. Experts and enthusiasts of spiritual and cultural values of forests from across Europe and Asia came together for three days to discuss how the “spiritual values of forests” have been relevant in the past as well as the present.  

The result is an exploratory study, based on knowledge from 18 inter-disciplinary experts including natural and social scientists, recently published in Ecology & Society. Funeral forests, forest therapy, and forest bathing: these are all “new” trends, especially in Europe. What is the spiritual fuss over forests about? That’s what we wanted to find out! 

But this spiritual interest in forests is not new at all. Humans have had a close relationship with forests and have been intrigued by their magical nature since forever. Societies depended on forests also for their spiritual development, e.g., sacred natural sites (sacred groves), of which some still exist today. We also know that forests and trees are often central in myths and folklore – thinking about the Brothers Grimm fairytales, but also myths including the mystical and magical power of certain tree species such as the oak…. (and again, even in art and films today such as Lord of the Ring’s Treebeard character and Avatar). 

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