Rain, Rocks, and Chanterelles: Just an Ordinary Sunday in the Nearby Forest

My friend and I had planned our forest date days in advance. Nothing special, really, just an ordinary Sunday and an ordinary patch of forest close to home. But there’s something about that ordinariness I can never quite explain, except to say: it’s always enough.

The Sunday morning didn’t promise anything remarkable. The sky was grey and rain lashed against the window as my friend arrived at my door. We decided to go anyway. We both had rain gear and proper boots, and a few drops from the sky have never been a good enough reason to stay indoors. And as it turned out, just as we stepped under the cover of the trees, the rain eased off.

The Breath of the Spruce Forest

Around us rose a tall, murmuring spruce forest. The treetops swayed in the wind, still dropping heavy, delayed drops onto our necks: rain that had already stopped falling from the sky but kept traveling down through the branches. The air smelled of wet spruce needles and moss, that scent that somehow seems to fill your lungs more completely than usual. Finns often say the forest has ‘oxygen-rich air’ after rain, and that moment I understood again what that means: the body settling, the breath slowing, the moment you step beneath the trees.

We walked along, picking blueberries and catching up on each other’s lives. Conversation moves differently in the forest than it does in the city, slower, but somehow deeper. There’s no rush to say everything at once when you have hours ahead of you and an entire silent forest around you.

…Once you sit on a rock

The trail led us upward, toward a high rocky outcrop. From there, the view opened out over the forests below: we could see the fog moving above the treetops and the clouds drifting across the sky.

We took out our seat pads from our backpacks and settled onto the rock. We had coffee in a thermos, along with some biscuits and dried mango, nothing extravagant, but exactly right for the moment. We sat there for a good while, talking about life, sometimes falling quiet, listening to the forest’s little sounds and silence at its best. This is the moment many Finns come to the forest looking for: no performance, no goals, just permission to sit still and simply be.

A Mushroom Forest

We made our way down by a different route than we’d come up, and soon the trail began to offer up mushrooms. My friend got excited about the chanterelles and porcini mushrooms and picked them along the way into a small bag. I kept snacking on blueberries, even though after the rain they’d turned a little waterlogged and bland, but there was a rhythm to it I didn’t want to break.

I stopped often to photograph the small details of the forest: moss-covered stones, the grey-green surface of lichen, the shapes of ferns curling toward the light like tiny spirals. Photographing nature is, for me, a way to slow down even further. Once you stop to look through a camera, you suddenly notice things you’d otherwise walk right past.

Want to try guided mushroom-picking? Join our trip every summer Tuesday in Espoo, Nuuksio, just a stone’s throw from Helsinki. Read more and book your spot!

No Schedule

At this time of year in Finland, darkness doesn’t fall early, so we had no reason to rush. We could sink fully into the mood of the forest on our own terms: stopping whenever we wanted, slowing down, taking a longer way around, scrambling up a steep climb or carefully picking our way down slippery rocks. Some stretches demanded full attention to every step; others let our thoughts wander freely.

By the time we got home in the afternoon, we felt both calm and pleasantly tired. The body had gotten a proper workout on the hilly terrain, and the mind had emptied out and filled back up with something better. Our mind held, once again, a quiet reminder that you don’t need a special destination or a grand plan. An ordinary nearby forest, a good friend, and a few hours to spare: that, it turns out, is already a lot.

And of course, after a walk like that, there was only one way to finish the day properly: we headed straight for the sauna.

Read next

A Rainy Forest Stroll? Tips for Enjoying It

Head to the Forest – How to Enjoy Your First Mushroom-Picking Trip in Finland

In the Finnish Woods: Finding Wellbeing for Body and Brain

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