The Goddess Beauty
What if the forest could speak—and you knew how to listen?
Ellen Dee Davidson believes the forest can do more than speak to us —it can heal. In her new book Sacred Forest Bathing, she explains how reconnecting to the natural world can offer profound healing, intuitive insight, and spiritual awakening—all by reconnecting deeply with the natural world. Perfect for audiences craving grounded wellness, mystical adventure, or eco-conscious inspiration, Ellen brings a unique voice to the nature-healing conversation.
Today, I am hiking through the blooming yellow skunk cabbages, nestled into the wetlands like a Monet garden. Their pungent, spicy smell fills the air. Winter wrens sing overhead. Every once in a while, I spy a small brown bird tucked in and partially hidden, like a little mouse snuggled into the roots of a fallen tree. Winter wrens are so plain compared to the magnificence of their songs, which fill the air with the joy of spring. Ah, to be alive to witness another spring! I sing along with the birds. One wren pauses her song as if listening and then sends another musical phrase shimmering through the forest.
Laughing, I romp down the trail. Spring is so vibrant that I can feel the plants delight in bursting growth. It makes me feel young. Beauty opens me to childlike wonder. Beauty is herself, a goddess. She’s sensual and enticing and lures us in with her attractiveness. She’s the most natural being in the world. Everywhere, nature creates exquisite beauty, whether it be rivers, deserts, rocks, mountains, forests, clouds in the sky, oceans, or canyons. Beauty is easily found in all ecosystems.
Beauty brings us home. We want to notice her, and that gets us right here, living in the present moment, the way so many spiritual teachers have recommended. Beauty is my easiest path into the now. I’m not the first one to notice the potency of beauty. Artists, poets, lovers, and many of us seeking a creative muse have been inspired by beauty. Tasting the tip of a tender fiddlehead fern, I think of how utterly sexy spring is. Plants are plump and juicy, colorful and enticing. If I were a bee or wasp, the yellow stamens of the white trilliums would be impossible to resist. Even to me, they look delicious.
To me, trilliums seem like the unicorn of flowers: rare, pure, elegant, and ethereal. The facts about them make them seem even more mystical. Each flower yields one seed per year, but the plants can live for almost twenty-five years. Still, it takes nine years after germination for a single trillium flower to bloom.
Perhaps most amazing is that the ones found in the ancient redwood forest, Trillium grandiflorum, are given their start in life by ants! Attracted by the sweet coating covering the seeds, the ants carry them underground into their colonies. They have been seen carrying the seeds as far as thirty feet away from the original plant. Once the ants have feasted on the sweet coating, the seeds are put on the ant compost pile and left to grow in a perfect underground environment. No wonder my trail is literally lined on both sides with trilliums.
Putting my nose a few centimeters from the flower, I inhale a fragrance too exquisite for words—although I’m a writer, and so I try. “It smells like an understated plumeria blossom,” I tell my friend.
“Much more delicate,” Allegra replies.
I agree, continuing to think about the goddesses of beauty. Freyja pops into my consciousness. I’ve been part of an Awakening Women Sadhana offered by Chameli Ardagh, and we are delving deep into the mythology of Freyja. There are many definitions for the word sadhana, which is a Sanskrit word roughly meaning “going directly to the goal of realization through spiritual discipline and various practices.” One method to do this is to evoke and embody the qualities of a deity. In spring 2023, I attended an online twenty-one-day experiential sadhana led by Ardagh, during which we embodied Freyja’s qualities. This was easier to do for me with Freyja than it had been with the goddesses we’d previously studied, such as Inanna. Freyja felt like me! She’s a majestic Nordic nature goddess, sensually alive, patron of the feminine mystical arts, untamed and free, and loves the forest.
Forest goddesses have arisen in cultures all over the world, wherever trees can be found. My maternal Celtic ancestry has quite a few, including Flidais, the Lady of the Forest, who guards fauna and flora. In the eastern Baltic, there is Lauma, a woodland fae goddess of trees and marshes. A Yoruba goddess named Aja is an Orisha spirit of the forest, kindred with animals, who heals with herbs. Some goddesses, like Arduinna, are specific to a particular forest, in her case, the Ardennes forest region in Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Asherah is a Jewish tree goddess. Kurozome is the spirit of the
Japanese cherry tree. The Dakota and Lakota tribes honor Canotila (Chawn-oh-tee-lah), which means “little tree dwellers.” Even Aphrodite, most often known as the goddess of love and beauty—the word aphrodisiac comes from her name—is also a nature goddess associated with apple trees.
Many of the tree goddesses are also goddesses of beauty. Dancing down the trail, arms waving as if I have more than two, like the Tibetan goddess Tara, who is also the goddess of beauty.
Our culture still worships beauty but, as with so much of the sacred, in a diminished and profaned way. Instead of the irresistible, healthy attractiveness of blooming as who we are, we have been taught that we have to change. Too fat, too thin, too old, too young, too this or that. In an effort to please, we twist and contort, losing the clear expression of ourselves that is inherently beautiful.
We’ve lost the goddesses we are.
Free.
Fierce.
Authentic.
Walking down this trail, I feel free, fierce, and authentic. Gaia comes to me, robed in redwood trees, towering over three hundred feet above me, some thousands of years old. She comes to me in the breath of scented air, the humming song of the forest, the caress of soft zephyrs on my cheeks. She comes to me in sweetness flowing into my heart. Gaia comes to me as a goddess, and this is one goddess of beauty I can get to know directly. I smell, hear, taste, see, and touch her. My perceptual capacity opens, and I know her through time, through the causal level, through the holographic blueprint that glistens energetically in my mind’s eye before taking form in matter. The seed knows the flower before the flower arises.
How do we water the seeds of the world we want? How do we create the conditions for beauty to flourish? How do we allow our own beauty to shine forth?
By Ellen Dee Davidson
Image by Mohsen Karimi
