grouper52
Masterpiece
I work a half day on Fridays, and came home yesterday with a number of hours of daylight left to spend in the yard. It was one of those cold, invigorating days here - moist air heavy with the fragrance of living and rotting things, overcast skies, but without wind or rain, the temperature bracing but not cold enough to harm the trees. These are the kind of days here that always make me think to myself that if I were a tree, I would want to live here.
For a couple of hours I worked on my project of expanding and organizing my vegetable gardens again this year, spurred by the news of growing food shortages and uncertainties, and by my love of such gardening. This year, as with the previous year, I’m focusing on heirloom dry beans that grow well in our short seasons here, and potatoes. A diet of beans and grains alone will provide complete protein, store well, and will keep people alive indefinitely. But grains won’t grow well here. Potatoes, however, grow amazingly well and store well, and while they don’t provide as good a mix of amino acids to compliment those in beans, like grains do, they are great foods and work well enough. With lots of stored food as back up, some chickens, and my wife’s propensity for trapping/hunting/fishing/collecting critters, the gardening should feed us well and provide items for barter if it ever comes to that. And, if it never comes to that, it’ll still be great eating, and lots of satisfying fun.
So, after a few hours of that, I was walking among the bonsai and pre-bonsai scattered around the yard, just checking them, seeing it anything called out to me to be worked on. On the northern part of the property, in a little nook hemmed in by Douglas firs, Broad-Leaf maples and Red alders, is where I keep most of my collected trees in various stages of transition to bonsai. Mostly they sit on the ground for a few years in the black plastic bags I collect them in, but a few have graduated to oversized grow pots.
An Alaskan Yellow cedar there caught my eye yesterday. I collected it with Dan Robinson and George Heffelfinger in an alpine bog on Vancouver Island three seasons ago while I was writing and photographing one of the chapters for the book up there with them. Part of the foliage died shortly after collecting, but after one year it looked healthy enough to transfer into a grow pot. It has done well since then, healthy, but I haven’t felt compelled to work on it more - until yesterday.
I went and got my little carrying tray, containing my primary everyday tools and wire, spread a small piece of plastic on the ground, and sat down with the tree. I had no great plans for it yesterday, I just wanted to look at its possibilities and clean it up a bit. I trimmed off some overly long dead branches, but left for another day one primary, foliage-bearing branch that I had originally thought to shorten. Instead I quickly fell into an activity I always love - stripping and scraping bark and expendable softwood from areas destined for deadwood features.
At such times, I am strangely uninterested in where I’m going with the tree, or what I or others will think of the area I’m working on, which is often so small and hidden no one will ever again pay it the attention I do in that moment: a moment entirely free of desired outcomes beyond the small task of cleaning this little bit of bark from this little knotted area here so as to better appreciate the pleasure of its gnarly form at this point in time.
I could easily use power tools for this - a light touch with the die grinder, or some Dremmel work - but I always just sit there for hours instead, often repeatedly at intervals over a protracted period of months, just slowly and patiently whittling away at it with a pair of the “bonsai knives” - right- and left-handed - that Dan Robinson designed years ago. These simple but spectacular tools, with just the right design for all manner of bonsai tasks, are always a joy to use.
The pleasure of those knives in my hand yesterday, the efficient way they cut, scraped and coaxed the bark and wood off the dead areas is hard to describe. That pleasure mixed with other sensations - the tactile feel of the deadwood and bark, the subtle sounds of the work slowly progressing, the gorgeous odors of the wood being exposed, the visual beauty and myriad details of the bark and wood and foliage, the moist air against my face, my dog occasionally nuzzling against me for attention. All these blended together to create a very serene state, free of discursive thought. It went on for hours. Timeless. Spacious. Untroubled. Exquisitely, peacefully aware.
This sort of state comes easily to me when working on bonsai. I naturally slip into it during such carving work, but also to an extent with many other aspects like wiring, or pruning, or simply watering or looking at or even repotting a tree.
For thirty years I have practiced and studied Eastern religions and a great deal of other esoteric lore, so I am no stranger to the such states, nor their terminology. However, I have no interest in a philosophical or theological discussion about such things here (though folks are free to discuss it if they want, of course). But I do wonder the following: although people can have these states in many settings and activities in life, is this state a significant part of the attraction of bonsai for anyone else among you the way it is for me?
For a couple of hours I worked on my project of expanding and organizing my vegetable gardens again this year, spurred by the news of growing food shortages and uncertainties, and by my love of such gardening. This year, as with the previous year, I’m focusing on heirloom dry beans that grow well in our short seasons here, and potatoes. A diet of beans and grains alone will provide complete protein, store well, and will keep people alive indefinitely. But grains won’t grow well here. Potatoes, however, grow amazingly well and store well, and while they don’t provide as good a mix of amino acids to compliment those in beans, like grains do, they are great foods and work well enough. With lots of stored food as back up, some chickens, and my wife’s propensity for trapping/hunting/fishing/collecting critters, the gardening should feed us well and provide items for barter if it ever comes to that. And, if it never comes to that, it’ll still be great eating, and lots of satisfying fun.
So, after a few hours of that, I was walking among the bonsai and pre-bonsai scattered around the yard, just checking them, seeing it anything called out to me to be worked on. On the northern part of the property, in a little nook hemmed in by Douglas firs, Broad-Leaf maples and Red alders, is where I keep most of my collected trees in various stages of transition to bonsai. Mostly they sit on the ground for a few years in the black plastic bags I collect them in, but a few have graduated to oversized grow pots.
An Alaskan Yellow cedar there caught my eye yesterday. I collected it with Dan Robinson and George Heffelfinger in an alpine bog on Vancouver Island three seasons ago while I was writing and photographing one of the chapters for the book up there with them. Part of the foliage died shortly after collecting, but after one year it looked healthy enough to transfer into a grow pot. It has done well since then, healthy, but I haven’t felt compelled to work on it more - until yesterday.
I went and got my little carrying tray, containing my primary everyday tools and wire, spread a small piece of plastic on the ground, and sat down with the tree. I had no great plans for it yesterday, I just wanted to look at its possibilities and clean it up a bit. I trimmed off some overly long dead branches, but left for another day one primary, foliage-bearing branch that I had originally thought to shorten. Instead I quickly fell into an activity I always love - stripping and scraping bark and expendable softwood from areas destined for deadwood features.
At such times, I am strangely uninterested in where I’m going with the tree, or what I or others will think of the area I’m working on, which is often so small and hidden no one will ever again pay it the attention I do in that moment: a moment entirely free of desired outcomes beyond the small task of cleaning this little bit of bark from this little knotted area here so as to better appreciate the pleasure of its gnarly form at this point in time.
I could easily use power tools for this - a light touch with the die grinder, or some Dremmel work - but I always just sit there for hours instead, often repeatedly at intervals over a protracted period of months, just slowly and patiently whittling away at it with a pair of the “bonsai knives” - right- and left-handed - that Dan Robinson designed years ago. These simple but spectacular tools, with just the right design for all manner of bonsai tasks, are always a joy to use.
The pleasure of those knives in my hand yesterday, the efficient way they cut, scraped and coaxed the bark and wood off the dead areas is hard to describe. That pleasure mixed with other sensations - the tactile feel of the deadwood and bark, the subtle sounds of the work slowly progressing, the gorgeous odors of the wood being exposed, the visual beauty and myriad details of the bark and wood and foliage, the moist air against my face, my dog occasionally nuzzling against me for attention. All these blended together to create a very serene state, free of discursive thought. It went on for hours. Timeless. Spacious. Untroubled. Exquisitely, peacefully aware.
This sort of state comes easily to me when working on bonsai. I naturally slip into it during such carving work, but also to an extent with many other aspects like wiring, or pruning, or simply watering or looking at or even repotting a tree.
For thirty years I have practiced and studied Eastern religions and a great deal of other esoteric lore, so I am no stranger to the such states, nor their terminology. However, I have no interest in a philosophical or theological discussion about such things here (though folks are free to discuss it if they want, of course). But I do wonder the following: although people can have these states in many settings and activities in life, is this state a significant part of the attraction of bonsai for anyone else among you the way it is for me?