At the end of October, I’m heading to Santa Fe for a portfolio review, where I’ll be showing my tree photographs to curators, gallery owners, and other people from the art world. In preparation, I have to write an artist statement and figure out how to talk about the work.

Trying to put into words how and why I make what I make is a slow, maddening task. I’m constantly wishing that Porter the artist and Porter the reluctant publicist would stop squabbling and just get on with it.

Then I happened upon a documentary about the poet Mary Oliver. I’ve always liked her work, but had her filed away as the nature poet who wrote about dogs, geese, and owls. Boy, was I wrong.

Her story was nothing like I expected. She had a difficult life and wrote the poems she wrote because, as she put it, “I got saved by the beauty of the world.” What I saw in the film was a deep integration of the person and the poet. The life and the work seemed inseparable. I came away reading her poems very differently.

So now I’m trying to channel a little Mary Oliver and try to persuade the part of me that makes the photographs to trust the part of me that has to explain them.

Since my project is about the language of trees, maybe I’ll talk to them about it, too.

My vernal pool photographs have been getting around since I completed the project last spring. This summer, three were shown in New York City, one in Middlebury, Vermont, and one in Austin, Texas. The pool below is currently hanging in a group show in Cambridge, for anyone in the area looking for a little cultcha on a quiet weekend afternoon.

As much as I enjoy seeing the work out in the world, I miss tromping around in the woods in search of these pools. I’d probably visit them all summer long if it weren’t for the ticks, which seem to be everywhere these days, especially in the dense, overgrown places where the vernal pools are doing their thing.

Photography aside, I've come to realize how much I need that time in the forest, and how much I miss it when I'm too busy with other stuff.

In the 1980s, the Japanese coined the term shinrin-yoku, usually translated as “forest bathing,” to describe the restorative effects of spending time among trees. It’s a good phrase, I think. It captures the way a forest can wash over you and calm a restive mind.

Of course, a vernal pool offers some forest-bathing opportunities of its own, but definitely for hardcore bathers only.

Harvard is offering a first-year seminar called "Tree," where each student spends a semester getting to know a single tree. Here’s a New York Times story about it…

For those unwilling to spend $91,634 on this particular experience, trees remain widely available, and generally free of charge.