Since Dr. Jane Goodall’s passing, I’ve found myself listening differently.

When I walk through the woods now, I can almost hear her voice, calm, observant, endlessly curious, reminding me that “every individual makes a difference, every day.”

I don’t need a lecture to feel her presence. I feel it in the wind moving through the tall grass, in the chatter of a squirrel perched perfectly on a log, and in the quiet hush of Meacham Grove, our family’s sanctuary.

The day after we brought Brute home, we brought him here. He jumped straight into the creek like he’d been waiting his whole short life for that splash. His first winter was here too, bounding through snowbanks like a cream-colored cartoon come to life. When the grass grows too tall, we stick to the trails. When the leaves fall and the forest opens up, we go off-road, following the animal paths, coyote tracks, deer prints, the soft evidence that life moves quietly alongside ours.

This place has watched us grow as much as we’ve watched it change.

Every season rewrites the same story in a new color: green to gold to white to mud to green again. And I’ve learned that this is what healing looks like, not a straight line but a cycle of remembering, resting, and returning.

Before it became a preserve, Meacham Grove was a different kind of landscape, farmland, quarry, stormwater basin. The lake was once a construction pit. Over the years, people who cared enough to notice helped it breathe again. They rebuilt the wetlands, restored the forest, and invited nature to take back what was hers. Today, this 250-plus-acre patch of earth filters stormwater, nurtures wildlife, and gives thousands of humans a place to come home to themselves.

A preserve is more than protected land; it’s a promise.

It’s a way of saying that some things are still worth saving, even if no one’s looking. Wetlands hold floodwater the way kindness holds grief, quietly, without fanfare. Forests breathe for us when we forget how. Every fallen branch, every ripple in the creek, every seedling fighting through the soil reminds me that restoration is not an act of perfection; it’s an act of patience.

Out here, people are different too. They’re not rushing, scrolling, or snapping at their kids in checkout lines. They’re walking slowly, noticing. A man fishing on one side of the bank. Two kids on the other, laughing. A couple hand in hand. Families exploring with toddlers who think every leaf is treasure. It’s a small miracle, this collective exhale that happens when people step into a place that doesn’t demand anything of them.

For me, walking here is my forest therapy, my nervous system’s reset button.

The Japanese call it shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. I call it remembering who I am. Every slow step through the Grove is an invitation to regulate, to feel, to notice. The way sunlight filters through the oaks. The way stillness softens the edges of the day.

Kindfulness lives here.

It’s mindfulness with heart. Awareness that doesn’t stop at noticing but keeps going until it reaches compassion. It’s the squirrel teaching me patience, the muddy path teaching me humility, the Grove reminding me that peace isn’t passive; it’s practiced.

Some days I wonder why I don’t come here more often.

We need it every day, but life gets loud and we forget. Then I’ll catch a glimpse of Brute’s paw prints on the trail, or the ripple of a duck landing on Maple Lake, and remember: sanctuary doesn’t keep score. It just waits for us to return.

When I think of Dr. Goodall now, I think of that, the quiet returning.

Her legacy isn’t trapped in textbooks or documentaries. It’s alive in the people who keep walking the trails, who choose curiosity over convenience, who see magic in the ordinary.

Hope begins with us, with the ones who notice, who care, who still believe that one small act of kindness, in a grove like this, can ripple far beyond what we see.

~