ENJOY CERES

Autumn in Ancient Rome officially begins on Sunday 22 September, the day before the birthday of Augustus, born 23 September 63 BC. He succeeded Julius Caesar after his assassination and governed from 27 BC. Romans were mad about astrology and less so about astronomy. It was thought that a child born on the day of the autumn equinox, usually taken to be 26 September, would be destined for greatness, and baby Octavian turned out to be exactly that.

An equinox occurs when the length of day and night are equal. The balance was simple and visible. The start of autumn marked a period of thanksgiving in Rome. Rome began as a rural settlement, with people living off the land, so the changing of the seasons shaped daily life. The harvest was gathered in and stored. Winter was planned for before the River Tiber froze over, as it did in 398 BC, 396 BC, 271 BC and 177 BC.

There is something steady about that rhythm. No productivity systems or endless notifications, just daylight shifting and woollen winter togas coming out because the nights were cold. Agricultural life slowed and you adjusted or you struggled.

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Ancient Romans loved to feast and they constantly offered sacrifices to the gods, perhaps more out of fear than gratitude. One Roman holiday similar to our Thanksgiving was Meditrinalia, a mid October harvest festival celebrating new and old wine. A favorite saying in association with the holiday was, Wine new and old I drink, of illness new and old I am cured.

The revelry continued through the night until it reached a peak and finally faded by dawn.

It was not curated joy. It was loud and physical, with bawdy songs and gambling that was otherwise forbidden. On every corner people rolled knucklebones and placed bets. Community was visible and unfiltered.

Saturnalia, officially on December 17, was dedicated to Saturn the god of sowing seeds. The festival began with a formal state sacrifice and was followed by a public feast. Blood dripped from the altar of the Temple of Saturn, pooling on the marble and soaking the priests’ robes, while a band of flute players drowned the victims’ squawks and squeals. Let the feast begin, he proclaimed, and the crowd broke into cheers.

It feels uncomfortable to read now because gratitude was physical and public, tied to land, livestock and survival.

In September there were ceremonies to Jupiter and Juno, followed by the Ludi Romani from 5 to 19 September, the oldest of the ludi, a set of public events and games. There were street markets and fairs from 20 to 23 September, a ceremony marking the rededication of the Temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius, and a celebration called Latona to pay tribute to Leto. A temple to Venus Genetrix was dedicated by Julius Caesar in the Forum.

The Roman Forum and Palatine Hill witnessed thanksgiving ceremonies

where Romans honoured their gods with feasts and offerings. Its roots stretch back to harvest festivals honouring Ceres, goddess of agriculture.

Most festivals were family and community based and even slaves participated. That detail matters.

Gratitude was not a private journal entry.

It was seasonal and structured, shared in public spaces and tied to the land itself. When the length of day and night stood equal and then slowly shifted again, people adjusted with it. They prepared, gathered what they had grown, gave thanks in the ways they understood and allowed the season to shape them in return.

• what the romans knew about harvest and thanks
• The Attention That Heals
• When Nature Isn’t a Backdrop
• Tree’s are Enough
• The Science and Soul of Being Outside

Somewhere between too many tabs open and forgetting why I walked into the kitchen, I started wondering if I’d just tapped out, not in some big dramatic way, just tired in that slow, dragging sense where your brain isn’t broken exactly but it also isn’t loading quite right and you start losing track of what day it is and whether you actually replied to that text or just imagined doing it while washing dishes

It wasn’t burnout, or not the kind that earns you time off and a formal diagnosis, more like the low-grade version that creeps in when you find yourself rereading the same sentence three times or sitting in front of a browser you opened for something you now can’t remember, so I started to play with this idea of nature as not just a reset button or a wellness trend, but more of a quiet nudge, a shift, something that asked nothing but still changed things, and it didn’t come from some TED Talk or overpriced retreat or linen-robed guide offering metaphors about trees and breath, it came from being fed up and cracking the window open just so I could feel some air that hadn’t been recycled through my laptop fan and lately, I’ve been thinking about what gets recycled inside too, how even the water I drink feels cleaner when I filter it myself, like I’m reclaiming some control over the mess. Great water filters is my choice.

That’s when I stumbled into the work of Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who proposed something called Attention Restoration Theory, or ART, which basically says that nature, gives our overworked attention systems the rest they need without shutting everything down and the way they describe it, “soft fascination”, the kind of attention that doesn’t take effort, makes sense if you’ve ever found yourself staring at clouds moving or leaves shifting or water flowing without really realizing you were staring, and for me it felt like being told that maybe walking barefoot to the bin because the grass feels different than the floor wasn’t just odd, it was actually doing something useful.

Science seems to agree, since it turns out directed attention, the kind we use for work and holding it together and pretending we’re listening, gets worn out fast and nature doesn’t ask for that kind of focus, which is probably why blood pressure drops and cortisol takes a break and surgical patients heal a little faster when there’s a tree outside the window and nurses feel like actual humans again after twenty minutes in a courtyard with plants and maybe a bird or two

In Japan, they call it Shinrin-yoku, which translates to forest bathing, and even though that sounds a bit poetic, it’s been taken seriously enough in places like South Korea and Canada that they’ve built programs around it and written it into prescriptions, but even without the backing of public health departments and meta analyses, I can feel the shift when I sit near a creek or stare into a cluster of eucalyptus leaves twitching in the breeze because something in me releases, unhooks, and I don’t need anyone to measure it for it to be real.

Even just looking at a photo can help, which I didn’t fully believe until I found myself staring at a picture of a dirt path I used to run back when my knees didn’t argue with me.

Turns out nature activates the brain’s default mode network, which handles wandering and reflection and the kind of blurry processing that rarely gets space in a to-do list but somehow clears out the backlog anyway, and maybe that’s why so many types of people, kids in rural towns, city dwellers feeling flattened, women post-surgery, folks with PTSD planting things, all seem to come away a little more whole

This isn’t about being outdoorsy or buying gear, I don’t even know what a spruce smells like or own proper boots, but I know that touching a branch or watching a crow hop across a roof can feel like a reminder that I exist, and sometimes that tiny reminder is the thing that steadies me when all the deeper tools fail.

Five hours a month is what some researchers say makes a difference, and that doesn’t sound like much, just a few afternoons without headphones, maybe standing by a tree or sitting on a step where some weeds have found a way through the cracks, and that kind of small, scrappy exposure can hold a person together better than anything you can order online

I’m not saying this fixes everything, because it doesn’t, there’s no enchanted grove with perfect answers, and nature gets stomped and neglected too, but even in its rough, overused edges, it still seems to offer something solid and wordless, a kind of company that doesn’t perform or sell or shout, it just remains, and sometimes that’s enough

So this isn’t a life hack or a polished listicle, it’s more of a note from one person trying to stay upright to anyone else doing the same, if you can, go outside, put your hand on something living, and let your brain, which was never built for constant alerts, remember that it used to belong to a body that looked at trees not for data, but for steadiness.

I used to think nature was just the bit you looked at through a car window or framed inside a phone screen, something you snapped quickly on your way to somewhere else, maybe with a caption that tried a little too hard or a filter that flattened the realness into something neat and scrollable, and I genuinely believed that was enough, that a five-second aesthetic appreciation could somehow replace the deeper, slower, more uncomfortable presence required to actually feel the shape of a place, but eventually, slowly, that started to wear thin.

The change wasn’t dramatic, not some overnight transformation but rather a quiet unraveling, first during lockdown when we were all forcibly reminded that movement could be simple and slow, and then later, after I left the city entirely, when I realized that walking the same muddy, uneven path every single day, not for fitness, not to check a box, but just to walk began to do something to my brain that nothing else really could, something quieter, deeper, the kind of shift you only notice when you stop scrolling long enough to hear your own thoughts echo back from the trees.

And while the science is there lower cortisol, less inflammation, immune system support, improved sleep, a whole host of physiological changes that researchers have managed to quantify, I didn’t need a double-blind study to understand that lying in the grass under an open sky somehow made my body remember how to relax in a way that apps and schedules never could, which is maybe the point, that nature doesn’t need you to track it to prove it works.

What really broke things open for me, though, was letting go of the idea that nature had to be beautiful in a way that looked good on a screen, or quiet in the way we want quiet to be, with all the chaos and interruptions and unplanned movements scrubbed out, because real nature is frameless, like Allen Carlson said, it doesn’t wait for your attention, doesn’t arrange itself to please your sense of symmetry, and the minute you stop trying to hold it still, the minute you stop curating your experience and start accepting the mess of it the birds and the flies and the way the light hits weird and the tree’s too close and your phone has no signal that’s when it starts to work, when you’re not the observer anymore but part of the scene itself, unfiltered and alive.

Carlson said we could use science to anchor our appreciation, to give shape to the overwhelm by understanding how rocks form or swamps function or how this specific tree came to stand here, and I get that, I really do, but sometimes I think the body already knows something the brain can’t quite measure, like how lying in sun-warmed grass without naming a single species or checking a single fact can leave you feeling more whole than any guided meditation app or structured self-care routine, and maybe that’s okay, maybe it’s even better.

So here’s the suggestion, not a prescription or a challenge or a productivity hack, just a quiet idea from someone who’s been tired too: go outside, not with headphones or goals or expectations, not even with shoes if you can help it, and just stand there for a while with the grass under your feet and the sky overhead and the whole weird orchestral tangle of birds and breeze and distant traffic and whatever else shows up, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that something inside you softens in response, not because it was told to, but because it remembered how.

There’s a moment, maybe halfway up a hill when your breath finally starts to match your stride and the tight coil of noise that’s been looping in your head begins to dissolve, not because you figured anything out or reached some big revelation, but simply because you’ve moved your body into a different space and nature, without asking, has moved in to take the edge off.

You don’t have to plan a weekend away or pay for a retreat in the mountains to get there, sometimes all it takes is stepping outside, standing still long enough to let your senses catch up, or even just pulling up a picture, a wide field, a tree line, something quiet with light stretched across it just right, and sitting with it until the rest of you follows.

Gratitude works in a similar way, in that it doesn’t need to be loud or visible to count, it could be something as small as remembering the person who made time for you on a bad day or saying thank you, even if it’s only in your head, to the morning for not going entirely off the rails, and sometimes that tiny act of noticing, of acknowledging, is the only thing keeping the whole thing from tipping.

Quick tip: I like to practice gratitude, through imagining the absence of the thing in my life. For example, if trees and plants did not exist, then it would be a very bland glance out my window, and I appreciate that I do not have to endure that reality.

When you bring both of those together, a slice of sky that doesn’t need you to name it and a moment of quiet thanks that no one else hears, you end up with something far more reliable than whatever digital solution promised to calm your mind or fix your mood, because they don’t demand anything from you, they just keep showing up until you remember to.

HOW BEAUTIFUL IS IT:

Hospitals, especially the ones paying attention, have started putting photos of trees or clouds or water into rooms, not as decoration to match the curtains, but as a kind of medicine that slips in through the eyes because the nervous system, in all its complexity, responds even when it knows the thing it’s looking at isn’t technically real, it just wants a way out of the loop.

Gratitude, for all its simplicity, rewires things too, it changes your sleep, your blood pressure, the weight of your heart and sometimes the tightness of your chest, not through force but through steady reminders that you are not alone in this, even when it feels that way.

Not everything has to run efficiently to be meaningful, you can tell the same story twice, you can walk the same path every day and still find something new in it, you can say thank you again and again to the same person, not because you forgot you already did, but because it still matters, and sometimes doing it again is how you know it stuck.

So if today felt too loud or too fast or like you missed the part where you were supposed to catch your breath, maybe try stopping, even for a minute, and let your eyes land on something still and living that doesn’t need anything from you, and let a memory or a name drift in, one that still holds weight, and just notice it, no action required.

This isn’t a tactic or a system or something to optimize, it’s just a passing thought, a nudge really, from someone else who’s still learning how to be here too.

Good luck.

When was the last time you were completely surrounded by nature, not just a park wedged between office towers, but somewhere real, somewhere your phone doesn’t quite work and the silence feels full instead of empty, where maybe it was a long walk through the woods or just sitting on the edge of a porch, coffee in hand, letting the breeze move through your hair while the birds offered their own version of a soundtrack that didn’t need editing.

That kind of moment doesn’t just feel good—it actually does something to you, even if you don’t notice it right away, and while I’m not always one to dig up research just to prove a point I already feel in my bones, this time I did, and turns out, there’s a lot of data backing it up—like this study out of Exeter that followed 20,000 people across all kinds of backgrounds, ages, and health statuses, and found that folks who spent at least two hours a week in nature reported feeling healthier, and not just in a vague, wouldn’t-it-be-nice kind of way, but actually and measurably better, even when their time was broken up over the week.

We’re talking real physiological changes here, not some imagined placebo—Florida Health connected time outside with lower blood pressure, steadier cortisol levels, stronger immune systems, and Japanese researchers even clocked an increase in NK cell activity, the kind that goes after tumors, while over at McMaster University, students are literally encouraged to step outside for better cognitive function, like sunshine and tree-lined paths are part of their unofficial syllabus.

Here is an interesting study to check out: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17903349/

But honestly, I’ve felt this long before I ever read about it—when I was a kid, I used to walk the railroad tracks near my house when everything at home got too loud or too tense, just listening to the wind in the trees and the birds doing their thing, sometimes even letting myself cry if I needed to, and back then I didn’t know that was called self-regulation or anything fancy like that, I just knew it helped, and to this day I still walk in the rain and hug trees—literally, not metaphorically—because there’s something about that connection that feels like it resets something in me.

The real issue isn’t that nature stopped working its quiet magic—it’s that we stopped showing up for it, getting caught up in all this concrete and glass and signal noise while the oxygen-rich spaces our bodies were built for get pushed further away, and places like Nicoya, Costa Rica remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way because they live longer out there, not because of some secret supplement or productivity hack, but because they never stepped too far from the ground beneath their feet.

So if the sun calls to you, go, even if it’s just for ten minutes, and don’t wait for some perfect excuse or polished routine, because there’s no badge for clenching your jaw through another checklist, but there is, quietly, steadily something real about stepping outside with no agenda and letting the air remind you of the version of yourself that doesn’t always need fixing.

Whenever I start to get caught up in the busyness of life and forget to “look around once in a while”, I notice my wellbeing declining. So I have prescribed myself a list, where I have to complete all items on the list until I can feel unhappy. I have found the source for a lot of my happiness, being the detachment from our ancestral way of living and conforming to the day to day activities which have come about from the industrial and information age.

So here is my list:

• Eat a nutritious meal.

Unfortunately, our biology being crafted for millions of years, has not developed the skill of quick iterations to adapt to these drastic changes in our lifestyle. For cereals, donuts and other processed foods which have become staples in some cultures diets, is not exactly the most optimal fuesl which our bodies have been programmed to run off of.😢

(for me I like high protein and low carb meals)

• Elevate my heart rate.

The are couple additives for this prescription. Preferrably the exercise should be done in nature, trying at all time to substitute the treadmill for a run in the park. And perform movements which I enjoy, tennis is my go to. The more you enjoy it the more likely you will do it (simple human behaviour)

• Engage in conversation

We are social creatures. We need to interact with one another and empty the build of anxious thoughts, when not released can drive us crazy.

Everytime I perform the items on this to do this list, I always have a greater peace of mind. A hidden propoerty of these items , is it can be performed in sequence. For example, inviting a friend to play tennis, fqacilitates banter and the catching up with the crazinesss and drama of eachothers lives, whilst you run and jump to get a ball inside the legal part of the opposition court. Additionally, after exerting calories I am typically famished, my favourite meal in this scenario is steak, eggs coupled with some avocado on the side. (quite carnivorious I know).

I believe everyone should craft their own list, which they test with themselves until finding the secret recipe. There are many others which I could have included, being:

• Removing myself from devices.
• Go exploring, do some adventurous.

But when extending the list, it invites complications and feelings of obligation to complete them, rather instrinsic desire.

All the best for crafting your own lists. Good luck.