Healing from Electronic Device Stress
by Diane Lundegaard, Dix Hills, NY
Marsha scrolled down the spreadsheet. She bit the side of her tongue. She could have sworn she copy and pasted the figures. The sound of her iPhone broke through her digitally stressed brain. She swiped open her phone. With a swivel of her chair, she looked up at the office wall clock. “I’m running late,” she said and put down the phone. Marsha went back to the spreadsheet, entered the missing figures, hit saved and sighed, “done.” She shut off her computer, threw her iPhone in her purse, stuck her iPad in her tote and headed for the elevator.
On her way down to street level she decided to buy a nature field guide. She needed to unplug and she had read that the best antidote to EDS, “electronic device stress,” was the great outdoors. She didn’t know much about nature, for her the world of trees, insects and water ways was more like a backdrop to her life than part of it.
Saturday morning, she stretched out of bed, walked to the window and parting the curtains saw signs of a lingering Halloween season, carved pumpkins and silly plastic skeletons dangling from tree branches. By the end of the week, they would probably be gone, but the potted chrysanthemums would most likely hold their own through Thanksgiving.
Marsha dressed quickly, grabbed a cup of coffee and her field guide. She got into her car and drove straight to one of the Island’s several nature preserves. Once there, she followed a sandy trail that wound past a stand of scrub oak trees. She stopped and consulted her guide. “It’s around Thanksgiving,” she read, “that winter bloom, better known as Witch-hazel appears. For identification, look for straw yellow confetti-like flowers on bushes with forked branches.” She looked around, and from where she stood, she muttered, “no such luck.” She fumbled through the guide again. Page fifteen of the dense paperback mentioned something called wooly bears. “That’s insane,” she said to herself. Fortunately, her curiosity, still stronger than her attack of wilderness fear directed her eyes back to the descriptive paragraph, “wooly bears are autumn caterpillars. The black and orange bristly banded creatures move slowly in search of logs to winter under.” Marsha, feeling brave, turned over a nearby fallen pitch pine branch but didn’t find any woolly bears.
The boisterous carefree sound of a child skipping towards Marsha distracted her. “So much for forest solitude,” she mumbled under her breath. When the child reached her, he stopped and asked what she was doing. Marsha held up her field guide. You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find a catbird nest?” she asked.
“Me, nope, but the trees do,” he said with a sunny smile and then as quickly as he arrived, he skipped his way back to his waving parents.
Marsha watched the child as he went along. He stopped to eye a rabbit nibbling at some short grass. She noticed him pick up something from the ground, perhaps a pebble or twig and stick it in his back pocket. Marsha basked in a moment of sudden awareness. The child needed no guide book, no formal instruction. His connection to the forest was spontaneous, natural and free. Marsha closed her field guide. She sat down in front of a pine tree and leaned her back onto its roughly textured trunk and let her eyes drift aimlessly over the sandy leaf littered soil. Her eyes followed an ant procession. She listened to a bird singing unconcerned about its species. By allowing her sensory perceptions to settle her into the forest Marsha not only become aware of forest details, sunlight sparkling on leaves, the fragrance of its pine scented woods, as well as bird flight patterns, she also became aware of how good she felt, and let herself melt into that peaceful sensation. She picked up a leaf and looked at its veins. They branched much the same way as the veins on the top of her hands and felt a bond with the leaf. She became aware of herself as not being in the forest, but as part of the life of the forest, a life very different from an electronically driven one.
Before getting up to head back home she spotted a deer. Marsha didn’t know its species, nor the deer, hers. Knowing wasn’t necessary to establish a common bond between them because a bond, via the shared elements of nature already existed. The deer continued foraging and then ambled off through the underbrush. Marsha picked some deer hairs that had collected on the bramble. Although her guide book might be useful to Marsha in a different way, the free form experience she ended up having, and the bits of soft deer hair she collected best offered her what she needed to overcome the effects of electronic device stress and to restore peace in her body, mind and soul.
Diane Lundegaard is a freelance writer and nature enthusiast. Her above short story, “Healing from Electronic Device Stress” ©2025 drew its inspiration from the Creation Magazine’s article by Julie Brams, psychologist, author, and Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) guide. ANFT aims to shift our perceptions from that of being separate from and dominant over nature to that of seeing ourselves as unified with nature.
