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There’s a revolutionary new way to walk through the forest. V-e-r-y slowly.

Take a few steps. That’s far enough. Now sit down and talk it over with the person next to you, for a long time.

It’s a New Age thing in Sonoma County. Walking very slowly through the forest — while thinking about walking very slowly through the forest — is a full-blown movement. It could be a paradigm. The people who do this call it “forest bathing.” It doesn’t involve actual bathing, the kind with water. It’s figurative bathing. You soak in the wonders of the forest. Take your time, a whole lot of it. And bring a cushion.

About a dozen of us forest bathers were sitting on the ground the other morning at Quarryhill Botanical Garden, in Glen Ellen (Sonoma County), to find out what it was all about. We had taken an hour to meander from the parking area 50 yards down a manicured garden trail overlooking a vineyard. The idea was to look closely at absolutely everything. Examine all twigs. Inspect all leaves. If you see an ant, stop and take it in. Get up close and personal with your ant.

At a half dozen steps per excruciating minute, covering 50 yards takes some doing.

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“It feels good to sit here and not go anyplace,” said Amos Clifford, the man in charge, the fellow who helped dream up very slow forest walking and who just wrote a book about it. His $15 paperback, “Your Guide to Forest Bathing,” has climbed like a trumpet vine to No. 3,726 on the Amazon best seller list.

“The slower you go, the more you experience,” Clifford said. “We’re always in such a hurry to go from ‘here’ to ‘there’ that we never fully experience ‘here.’”

There was a lot to talk about the other morning. There was a long discourse about a hummingbird. Several of us had seen it. The hummingbird had been amazing, we agreed. Also amazing was a wild rose bush, a honeybee, the sound of a distant stream and some purple flowers that nobody knew the name of.

“It doesn’t matter if you do not know the name of the species,” said Clifford. “Learning biology is important but it’s not what we do. We tell people to go find another place to do that.”

What’s important is your relationship to the purple flower. Think it over. Take your time. The flower isn’t going anywhere.

Such sentiments are quite at home coming from Clifford, 63, of Santa Rosa. The longtime Zen meditation student worked as a traditional Sierra hiking guide and a mental health counselor before getting into the forest bathing trade about six years ago, adapting it from a similar Japanese practice.

Clifford has turned his slow walks into a cottage industry. He leads $50 forest bathing treks for newbies. He teaches $3,400 forest bathing workshops for wannabe leaders. He lectures and writes. From Sonoma County, the spiritual home of forest bathing, he flies around the world in jets to tell people they’re moving too fast.

But you cannot go on a nature walk, even a slow one, without eventually walking. Now, Clifford said, it was time for each of us to walk around — not very far, and not very fast — and pick out a tree and talk to it..

Clifford called it an “invitation.” Forest bathing walks are a series of invitations to do something, like “embody awareness” or “notice what you’re noticing” or “talk to a tree.”

“I want everybody to find a tree that’s your twin,” said Clifford. “Talk to your tree. Ask your twin about yourself. Find out all you can from your tree. Put your hand on your tree. Take your time to get to know your tree.”

And so it was that a dozen people walked around, slowly, talking to trees. Like the purple flowers, the trees remained anonymous. We didn’t have to know what kind they were, only what was on their minds.

After 20 minutes of human-tree conversation — much of it one-sided — we forest bathers returned to the same spot and sat down in the same circle to share our conversations with our trees.

“My tree asked me why I was so afraid,” said one forest bather.

“My tree said it thought that we could grow together,” said another forest bather.

One older woman observed that the leaves at the top of her tree swayed in the breeze, but that the trunk of her tree did not move, being thick and solid and stuck in the ground. She called it an interesting contrast — although it could just be the nature of the trunk-leaf paradigm. (This reporter ventured that trees are bloodthirsty, pushy little devils, and there is nothing tranquil about the life-or-death struggle they wage with their fellow trees for sunlight. Hardly a life form to have a friendly conversation with.)

After everyone had spoken his or her piece about their twin trees, Clifford brewed up a pot of tea taken from plants gathered during the walk. This was an iffy prospect, as Clifford had revealed earlier that he wasn’t exactly sure what poison oak looks like — not the sort of thing to pass most nature guides’ lips. But the group sipped, and survived, and at long last the forest bathing was over.

It turned out that the botanical garden had been the second choice for the day’s forest bath. The actual forest where Clifford usually conducts his forest bathing — Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Kenwood, up the road — was closed because a nasty rainstorm made the trails unsafe. Like a quarterback at the line of scrimmage, Clifford audibilized. Nature is always in flux, he said, and humans must adapt when their chosen forest is padlocked. The nearby botanical garden would do, he said, even if the trees and plants were accompanied by those pesky little signs that can supply more information than a forest bather really needs. Botanical garden bathing is close enough to forest bathing that only sticklers would find fault.

When it was all over, three hours later, one of the forest bathers, Anne Cardosa, of Sacramento, said she enjoyed forest bathing so much (“I felt hypnotized”) that she had signed up for Clifford’s course on how to be a forest bathing guide. Cardosa said she would soon be running her own forest bathing programs in the Sierra foothills near Placerville.

“I want to help other people heal,” she said. “I want them to feel the sense of complete calmness that I did.”

That idea, Cardosa said, came from her inner spirit, not from her tree. The tree hadn’t said anything, one way or the other.

We stood up and brushed off the forest from the seats of our pants, where a forest tends to gather when one sits down in the middle of it. Then we walked back to our parked cars, actually covering a little ground this time, now that it no longer counted.

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com