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I cohost a podcast called Fifty Words for Snow, where my wonderful Welsh cohost, Emily John Garcés, and I chase down unusual and valuable words from across the globe. Some are ancient. Some are modern slang. Some are invented by poets who create entire languages. Our only requirement is that the word shifts the way we see the world. This week, the word that did that for us was biophilia.
Biophilia literally means an innate human love of nature, but the feeling behind it is more dynamic than a fondness for trees. It carries the idea that the world is not passive. It acts on us. It shapes us without our planning or permission. It works on the mind the way the wind works on leaves, rearranging thoughts that have gotten stiff or frozen. I have begun to realize that letting the world do the work is often wiser than my usual strategy of trying to tinker with myself from the inside out.
This idea became beautifully clear when we interviewed Kimberly Haley-Coleman, founder of Globe Aware, an organization that creates short-term service experiences in communities around the world. People often imagine that volunteering means going somewhere to fix something. Kimberly reframed it with a gentleness that surprised me. She told us that volunteers may arrive ready to work, but they leave transformed by the environment itself.
As she put it, “We intentionally embed people in moments where the environment works on them. They reconnect to nature, to the community, to the rhythms of a place. It changes how they see everything.”
She described volunteers mixing mud and ash to build homes in Kenya or pouring concrete beside families in Guatemala. “You think you are there to offer something,” she said, “but the landscape, the sounds, the people, the forest, it all works its way into you. You are being built while you are helping to build.”
Biophilia in action. The power of nature, not as decoration but as collaborator.
The Word That Names the Wind’s Work
One of my favorite examples of biophilia is a Dutch word we love on the podcast: Uitwaaien. It means to walk out into the wind and let it clear your head. Not force clarity. Not push through. Not wrestle with your thoughts. Simply stand there and let the air reorganize whatever has gone tight inside you. Let the small bureaucrats of worry lose their files in the gusts.
Uitwaaien is a word of surrender in the most liberating sense. It suggests that your surroundings know how to care for you in ways you might not know how to care for yourself. You give your weight and your worries to something larger and older than you. The world steps in. The world takes over.
Kimberly said something that sounded like the sister-concept of uitwaaien. “If you put yourself in an environment that you do not recognize, where the food and clothes and sounds are all new, it reorganizes the molecules of your brain,” she told us. “You see everything with a new perspective.”
That is what the wind does. It reorganizes. It rearranges. It takes the burden of effort off your shoulders.
Letting the World Work on You
Biophilia offers a different way of approaching well-being. Instead of scanning ourselves for flaws that need correction, we can let the world participate in our healing. The sun warms what has gone stiff. The ground reminds us of humility. Air does its cleansing. Forests, rivers, birds, mud, stones, and even the ordinary weather want to join the conversation of who we are becoming.
Nature does not ask us to earn this. It only asks us to show up.
Today I plan to step outside for a moment and let the wind do what it does, and the sun and the earth, the whole shebang. Let the world carry a little of my weight. It has been holding heavier things than me for a very long time, and it seems to know what it is doing.
