A person awakened to the essential mutability of life does not dread physical waning or loneliness; rather, he or she accepts these facts with quiet resignation and even finds in them a source of enjoyment.
Kyozo Murata
The end of a week is not an unusual time to find oneself going through the bottomless pit of unread emails. Neither is the article about bonsai near the bottom: a secret philosophy, you say?
“And what about it?”
It has been there for months and yet it waits to be read, like any other shiny thing that catches one’s eyes. The main idea is that it bears the name philosophy in its head, so perhaps that might be it. Yet another is the one word about trees. Here we see clearly the ghost of a sunny day. The legend goes that one time a child had gotten sick and it was only the sun and the garden who gave her solace. Said child refused medicine and so nature had to step in, quite willingly so without asking for neither payment nor doctor’s fee. Just that you stay alive, are their words. “No, I will go back here often, here in the back garden. I will plant. I will tend to your fruits which shall sustain me.”
The legend continues that she did, well until adulthood when the day that her ordered parcel had finally arrived. Multiple boxes brought in seeds and gardening tools, and the human spent whole morning in hopeful silence. The next day, too, and the day after it. Until the storm came and many other people started arriving in the garden. Until the garden had become a city. And the city the centre of budding market economy. There is now no more space for the wasted lettuce seeds.
She returns to the place where she contracted her illness and asks: if a vegetable can be ordered online, is it worth planting?
One asks to no one in particular over and over again as many other thoughts go through the mind. Thoughts such as what should we do next?, or what can the point of this be?
Here are days when one’s thoughts seem to be everywhere but where it should be, and by that it means where it is expected to be.
An article about bonsai is but a blunt reminder of the disregarded plots some metres away. Something pulls one’s heartstrings as every word of its supposed ‘philosophy’ passes through, bringing with it images of a quaint house of a retired elderly tending to his collection and the warmly crafted beach house from a recent series that one watches for a momentary respite or something like that. These days feel like the easiest thing is for the hours to simply pass by: eventually the body where the soul resides will change with the flowing days, the hair will grow out into a new canvas, the next episode will arrive, a new show will take its place in one’s mind for the moment, the requirements will be done.
Yet everything seems to struggle to move when it is expected to do so. Looking toward the future becomes a sort of intoxication: a distraction that eventually weathers the distracted. Every particle whithers away gradually and the eyes are now seeing everything and nothing.
The image of a bonsai tree is in front: between the keyboard and the wide curved monitor. It has no shadows because the room is dimly lit with a gentle yellow light that both soothes the eyes and makes reading painful at the same time.
The bonsai does not exist but she keeps thinking, what if it does?
But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.
Verlyn Klinkenborg in Several Short Sentences About Writing
“I would want to try—to have it block the way from whatever is expected of me so that only its leaves will I see. Even for just a moment. I want to see nothing but the tiny tree that grows with me.”
And yet the bonsai does not yet exist. The thought of another living being in the tiny, dimly lit office is overbearing.