Gareth O'Callaghan: Maybe we need a 12 step programme to deal with this modern monster — the great exhaustion

'Call it Stifledism — a state of being spiritually cut off from what we need and crave'

'Trees are nature’s constant that we have all but forgotten for their healing powers, unlike the greed of modern-day society.' File picture: David Keane

“To be awake is to be alive.” In the late 1840s, Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s greatest philosophers, wrote these words while living in a tiny cabin he built at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, on land his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson had purchased to preserve its natural beauty.

Central to his entire life, Thoreau saw nature as a vehicle for how to make sense of why we exist, and how the greatest possibilities we will ever discover are recognised through our encounters with nature.