The Nature of Family

"This morning my mother, my little brother and I went for a walk down to the river by my house. It is a very nice walk with plenty of fruits trees around and mountains surrounding the area. We walked down
river and without saying anything to them about the activity and mainly out of my spontaneous attraction to some plants and rocks and trees, I started telling them about my attractions to that place and to specific things. I also used the approach of talking to nature, and calling the plants friends and saying things like: "excuse me friend, I'm walking past you, I don't mean to disturb you."  It was fun! After a few minutes, my mother and my little brother were also expressing their specific attractions to the place and my little brother was also talking to the plants (even though I know he mainly see it as a game and likes doing what the older brother does).

It was a fun time down there, it was nice to feel that a place so close from my house can feel so different and so free from disturbances. It definitely feels like that place down there is just a world in itself, a balanced community."

Response from an online classmate overseas: "A simple yet powerful example of how we can include others in our relationship with Nature, lead by example. What a gift to give to little brother!"

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[Catrien Ross]

Japanese Natural Attractions

Yukio and I decide to climb up to the hinoki (Japanese cypress) forest behind the house. This time Emmi and Fu accompany us. They are delirious with joy. On the slope we pass many huge holes dug up by wild boar. They love the roots of mountain lilies (they also love kudzu roots, and bamboo shoots and once they ate all the tulips and muscari in my garden).

The hinoki forest is dark, cool, damp. It smells of the earth, of hidden places, of wet leaves and forest soil and rich, dark, humus. At first we choose a circle of seven trees to try the activity. But we realize this won't work. I will too easily recognize when the land is sloping up or down.

We talk and Yukio suggests that the only way is if he carries me piggyback to a tree and then carries me away from it. On this slope? I voice slight concern. But this is what we do. I close my eyes and Yukio lifts me off the ground. It is such a curious feeling. Now, not only can I not see with my eyes, I do not have the sense of my legs and feet to guide me. An image enters my mind. Once, on a Japanese country road, I saw a man carrying his very old mother on his back. She was a tiny, wizened woman and looked ancient. The man was not so young, but he was walking slowly and steadily, carrying his mother. I was so moved.

This is what we are, I think, as I am carried over the ground. We become only through our relationship to someone and something else. We need one another. We cannot survive in a state of isolation from our webstrings. I lean my cheek against Yukio's shoulder and relax into my vulnerability. Although I am not yet so very old, my being carried like this gives me the strange sense of being all the old women who were once carried through the forest on a Japanese mountain. Another image comes to me - an old Japanese story made into a movie. An aging son struggles to carry his mother, piggyback, up, up, up through the forests on a mountain in winter. She has asked him to do this because she is now very old, too old to be of use she says, and she wants him to leave her up on the mountain, in the falling snow, to die alone. This actually used to happen a lot in the Japanese countryside. Where and how am I going to meet my own death, I briefly wonder.

Yukio sets me down at a hinoki tree. I begin to sense it. I encircle it with my arms and find that I can grasp the elbow of the opposite arm. I inch my left hand up the trunk. Just a little way up there is a knob, and if I stretch farther, another knob. I put my cheek against the trunk. There is very little smell, but it feels cool. Under my fingers the bark is flaky, layered. I crouch down and feel around the base of the tree, where it begins to rise up from the earth. I can place my left and right hands on opposite sides of the tree and there is a similar hollow. There is a gnarled part. I can grasp it with both hands. I stretch out my arms and touch a branch with the fingers of my right hand. OK, I am ready to leave this tree. Yukio carries me away, piggyback.

Over in that direction, he says, to start me off. I begin feeling the trees. This one is too small in diameter. This bark has no knobs. This one has a knob, but it is not the same. I examine one tree. It immediately feels familiar. I check the points I remember and they are all there. This is the tree. I have found it again. I am exhilarated, encouraged. I feel good about myself and my ability.