Bonsai
Image by Wyxina Tresse @wyxina for Unsplash
The little pot of glazed ceramic was a tiny jade temple, graceful and charming. Inside was a miniature juniper tree that looked both ancient and implausible. It had been shaped in the traditional windswept style (Fukinagashi), with leaning trunk, and all branches growing to one side in artful asymmetry to suggest the force of great winds.
It was a birthday gift, offered by a good friend in generous awareness of my love of trees, and it filled me with dismay.
It came with a book of instructions that firstly described how the hands of a skilled craftsman had cut away the major roots, a crucial step in ensuring the tree would remain stunted. Those hands had then whittled and wired the trunk, pruned the branches and clipped the foliage into shape, thus moulding its natural tendencies into a piece of object d'art. The instructions promised I could learn how to maintain this work to ensure the object retained its integrity.
I sat the remnant juniper on the verandah where I began each day with Qigong. As my body moved and stretched, the tree sat motionless, a tiny, tragic presence in the bright morning sun.
As the days passed, my moving body began to live an ancient dream, where roots thrust deeply underground, connected across vast distances by webs of mitochondria that nourished the trees and the scrublands above. Here each tree was sovereign to a patch of country, family scattered wide, their silent song ringing out across the generations of savage wind and blazing sun. Here they were the elders in their community, the home place for small beings to hide, to eat, to find a moment of dappled pause in the bake of day. This great tree within my rootless body became insistent, its movement a constant demand, impelling upward and out, cracked open by storm, bending with the wind.
Nights also brought dreams. While the juniper dwelt in its stillness, my body was restless. Sleep brought remorseless visions of tiny Japanese feet, the shock of unbinding as one great toe was exposed, the other remnant toes stunted and wedged underneath, their shocking smell jolting me awake.
I decided to move the tree away, to make a new space for it where it could not see me. As I bent to pick it up, there was a smell…..
And with that came a great unbinding. I picked up the pot with careful hands and carried it into the garden. We sat for a time, the tree and the garden and I breathing together, and then I gently moved some groundcover, and dug a small hole. It was shockingly easy to remove the tree from its pot. It cascaded out in a shower of tiny white pebbles, and sat quietly in my hands for a moment, this green, living thing, before I settled it gently into the earth, and then gave it a light, soaking shower.
I washed the little pot, filled it with sand, and placed it on my altar. It is there now, three slender sticks of Japanese incense offering their delicate fragrance in tiny ribbons of drifting smoke.
Some weeks followed. I had heard rain in the night, and everything was still damply fragrant when I went onto my verandah for Qigong. Afterward, when I walked out into the garden, the little tree was newly adorned with a shoot of vivid green that had flung itself outward in the opposite direction to its windswept kin, the sprig enormous and dishevelled in comparison to its tidy, stunted trunk.
My heart gave a hard thump of recognition, and I sank to the ground. The day warmed and the breeze quickened as we sat together in the dirt, sending our new shoots outward and up with wild abandon, in love with the indomitable anarchy of life.
