Mountain stage -  

wind sings 

bamboo dances 

NIGHT BAMBOO



Standing out in the strong wind last night getting a good soft buffeting, listening to the air itself roar the way it does when seasons change, in the castoff light from the house windows I watched the same bamboo I always see as a wall of vegetation in the light of day, when I look out the window or glance up from gardening or firewooding-- 

But now, in the light upon the dark, and as a figure in the picture myself I saw the bamboo as if on a stage before me, saw how it lived and moved in ancient understanding of the roar of an autumn night-- it was a different beast, clearly alive now out here in its world, collective in its singularity, truer to its nature there in the night of its life, where seeing is of no point and being is all--



I'd always thought of this bamboo in itself as individual stalks, the stubborn ones I now and then had to force my way through on a path of last resort. A feisty plant in its human relations, this is the variety they make fishing rods out of - mountain bamboo - taller than a man but slender and crowded, grows too densely for any but wild pigs, ferrets, foxes and snakes to travel easily through (bamboo and animals share a primordial alliance of noses and shapes); but now, in the rush of the night, each light-paled stalk was on its own, yet one with all the others.

Like a school of bright fish in a dark sea they were together, shifting and swaying, shining and turning as one golden mass in the roiling ocean of black air that moved with and around them, 'together' in the deepest meaning: wind and stalk, air and plant in one vast lifewave, both surrendering, both prevailing, air moving on, bamboo letting it go and holding fast to the earth, each stalk reaching even in the night for the light of the day to come, in ancient and undying trust.

BEANS DON’T GRAB MY BAMBOO

Just out this blustery morning checking the bean plants, now about 30cm high and beginning to reach about, so into the soil beside each of them I inserted a selected mountain bamboo tip about a foot tall, after trimming off the multiple little branches down to an inch or so, providing a nice little sequence of easygrabbies up which the little bean plants can climb and hold against the wind to do their beanie max, but after 1 week I can see that they don’t care, they don’t give a damn, beans have no gratitude. But I knew that.

For some reason, the new beans ignore this valuable gift and just go scrabbling along, blown this way and that, looking for what, I don't know, an escalator? Is this a characteristic of modern young beans or has it always been like this? An even more disturbing thought is that maybe they’re like me when I was their age, all the obviously advantageous wisdoms and facilities around me and I ignored them for pennycandy fluffstuff I don’t even remember. Are there teen beans?

Gardeners can’t help but plummet down the rabbit hole of such thoughts when they behold the natural world from up close, first-hand, dirt-knuckled. They look at other gardens, as I do, in my local wanderings, here and there noting the little tricks gardeners use, like one I saw several days ago, of tying a tangly handful of upside down broomstraw to a stake above a bean plant for the beans to grab onto and climb.

Naturally I was impressed by that and will try it, just like when I saw a farmer use some cut mountain bamboo tips with the branches trimmed back to a few inches stuck in the ground above his bean plants so they could climb easily what a great idea, so at once I cut some of the mountain bamboo that grows so prolifically around my house it’s a pain - plus I love free stuff - so I stuck it in the soil above my bean plants and they just bent right past it, ignored it cold, like they ignored my dangling strings, my jerrybuilt trellises, my rough braided twine...

Those farmers and I are using the same beans; I should see what they use for discipline.

WILD GOVERNMENT

Wading into the bamboo over-and-undergrowth, a broad green tapestry woofed with vines of kudzu, wild grape, wisteria, yamaimo and other strivings wrapped around every rising stalk, all battling for a bit of the sky...

You're trying to get to the opportunistic locust tree, one among the many that rise up here and there on untended properties, the flexy bamboo and curly vines grabbing at your boots and buttons, legs and arms, feet and tools, you have to be free of artifice and shaped like a snake, boar or fox to flow like life through this kind of mountain growth, this vegetable government, but you're unsuited in about every way possible so progress is slow, a constant leaning against the relentlessly buffered presence, much like trying to deal directly with a human government, which everyone living and dead knows is akin to madness, but once you get started, the further you advance the more of a waste it is to turn back, so you keep on going, you keep on trying, working at leaning farther, pushing harder, falling forward with all the meager weight you can bring to bear against it all while forging forward with your shoulders, legs and feet and you do... appear... to... make... some...... progress... though only a little—it takes a while…

But did you really advance, did you really, drenched in sweat but perhaps truly halfway there now, with scythe, clippers and saw, all targeted by the vines that pull at them, trying to wrench them from your hand or pocket, loop or holster, take them back to the earth, and you too, you might wind up here forever one big green verticality, overgrown before too long, wrapped in green, kudzu grows as fast as any bureaucracy, and you're really part of all this anyway, over your head out here in this green expanse, eyes peeled for a true sign of progress through all this green tape, this tangle that is home to snakes and hornets' nests, wild pig dens, deer beds and bear lairs, trying just to get to a tree-- the tree--

Is the view all that important from the living room of the house you used to live in back there in that other time, that other place so far away on one shore of this green sea, becoming the illusion that perhaps it always has been - that may be the true nature of things - fuzzy at the edges and shimmery at the center like an old movie, do you really need that comfort to which you may never return, can you have it more than once, be again where you spent such a pleasant portion of your life as it passes before your eyes and then you are at the tree itself, struggling to regain your focus, clippers and folding saw at the ready...

Wiping the sweat from your eyes you climb a bit, reach up and clip off the tips of the highest branches, saw off the big one that splays its fingers in front of the nose of the Sleeping Buddha out on the Lake, or so it looks from that living room you had back there, the cut branches fall, you climb down and turn around like a world turns around and begin the falling struggle of your journey homeward across and through this green governance, fighting for each step, the well-organized wildness plucking at everything about you that has an angle and seeks to be elsewhere-- and may be, before too long...

COOL

The list of fortunate gardeners is not a long one these days, but it occurred to me this morning that it's a really lucky gardener who lives next to a mountainside of bamboo perfectly sized for use in gardening to make stakes, lattices, trellises and, oh, large statues of Brigitte Bardot if you're of such a mind and have the time.

This is not the standard biggo kind of bamboo that you can make walls and pipes out of, this is the strong but slender kind, that for example is finely handcrafted into the world's best flyfishing rods for thousands of dollars, but I get it for free. So when I need to make a slender lattice to keep my pushy squash leaves from bullying my shy peppers, or a nice inviting ladder for my touchy cucumbers (a device of my own crafty invention that might even give the cuke-thieving monkeys a bit of well-deserved trouble), I just wade into the green whispering sea next door and select my bamboo stalks, much like Stradivari must have selected his viola woods.

The farmers down in the village have to drive all the way up here to get theirs, and small bundles of this quality item are sold for a lot more than nothing at the gardening stores in the city, where nature costs money, but I have the entire inventory right here at hand and I get it for free-- all the heights, all the thicknesses. So if you want to come and get some just let me know. Then after you cut your selection and start to trim them you can leave a few spiky branches here and there along the desired length for cucumber tendrils to cling to on their way to the sky. The climbing vegs - such as beans, squashes and cukes - naturally prefer a natural surface and don't really bond with plastic, just like human beings (there's a bit of climbing vegetable in all of us).

So this morning when I spotted my vigorizing cucumbers ignoring the plastic support poles (I left the winter snow supports in place), I went and Stradivariated several ideally sized, strengthed and lengthed stalks so as to provide the the optimal cucumber-appreciated tonal quality, and bound them into a cucumber ladder that the cukes are even now climbing like a little kid runs up a set of stairs in a new house, only slower.

I thank the bamboo grove, it just nods in return. Bamboo is so cool.

From the archive - July 28, 2003:

BAMBOO DOESN'T FOOL AROUND

We have dialogued, bamboo and I.

Since I moved here the bamboo (the 3-meter tall 2-cm thick mountainside kind that creates an impenetrable green wall traversable only by wild pigs, foxes, pheasants, ferrets and snakes), I've learned much about bamboo relentlessness and singleness of purpose.

Don't let that subtle yet elegant demeanor, that Asian inwardness, that quietly sophisticated, golden segmented curvature fool you. Don't be deceived by that slender arching tallness, that timeless sheen. Bamboo works 24 hours a day.

Just because it's made into delicate cages for crickets, or into hair-thick wickets for catching tiny freshwater fishes, or shaved into feathery whisks for ceremoniously stirring green tea into an inviting froth, don't conclude therefore that bamboo is a delicate, effete, lily-wristed wisp of a plant. It is not. It is rooted with cables of steel.

You know this when you live with it growing on the land beside your garden, into which the bamboo subterraneously insinuates itself day and night, sending its long cableroots silently across in the dark a foot or two beneath the so innocently clear-looking soil; then one day when at last you are naively priding yourself on having won your battle with that puny weakling of a plant, your golden nemesis sends up here and there all over your garden its many silent green flags of conquest, which it then proceeds to celebrate with practically visible growth upward. Some species grow a meter a day.

Bamboo is in fact a single-minded, deeply rooted, relentless rocket of a plant, with a patience much older and deeper than our own; so patient that some species bloom only once in a century or so. No need for hurry, when such power is yours. I am temporary; bamboo prevails. And strong? Ask me, who have tried to cut its stalks, root out its roots, for years now. It is stronger than earthquakes, let alone me.

It is so strong that in Japan it is traditionally grown like big living mats on hillsides, so that its deep tangle of steel-cable underpinning holds the hillside in place while the earth rolls and roils like a just-caught eel. Such strength must be honored.

So although I know that one day my mountain garden may very well be a flourishing bamboo thicket once again, in the blessing of the meanwhile the green army and I do battle of an ancient and honorable kind, that I learn much from, and do not really want to win.

NIGHT BAMBOO 1

Standing out in the strong wind last night getting a good soft buffeting, listening to the air itself roar the way it does when seasons change, in the castoff light from the house windows I watched the same bamboo I always see as a wall of vegetation in the light of day when I look out the window or glance up from gardening or firewooding-- but now in the light upon the dark and as a figure in the picture myself I saw the bamboo as if on a stage, saw how it lived and moved in ancient understanding of the roar of an autumn night, it was a different beast, clearly alive now, collective in its singularity, truer to its nature there in the night world, where seeing is of no point and being is all--

I'd always thought of the bamboo in itself as individual stalks; this is the variety they make fishing rods out of, mountain bamboo, grows taller than a man but is slender and crowded, too densely for any but wild pigs, ferrets and snakes to get comfortably through, maybe a fox now and then (the bamboo and the animals share a primordial alliance of noses and shapes) but now in the hurry of the night each light-paled stalk was on its own, yet one with all the others, like a school of bright fish in the sea they were together, shifting and swerving, shining and turning as one golden mass in the roiling ocean of the air, that ocean moving with and around them, 'together' in its deepest meaning, wind and stalk, air and plant in one vast thought swaying, vibrating; both surrendering, both prevailing, the air moving on, the bamboo letting it go, holding fast to the earth, each stalk reaching even in the night for the light of the day to come, in ancient and undying trust.

BAMBOO GYMNOPEDIE

In the noon phase of typhoon #6, on the way back upmountain from dropping Echo off at the station I stop on the road by the big bamboo grove to watch one of the most beautiful and elegant dances in the world: bamboo in wind.

In the edgy light from the east against the dark green of the mountains and the thunder gray of the typhoon clouds, the pale jade bamboo in its tall slim splendor, like 15 meter feathers with golden quills, sways back and forth in a slow, soft roil that shows the edges of the wind as the green arms sway in the spirit of waves, with soft bows and hand gestures, all of an elegance that dancers imitate in vain, the racing wind producing only slow green response in the whole of the grove; it reminds me very much of the way seaweed sways in an ocean storm.

Inside the bamboo grove stand an old oak and a cedar, imparting darkness and depth, rising in their relative rigidity, and it is easy to see why oaks and cedars blow over all the time, but bamboo never: bamboo knows how to dance.

BAMBOO DOESN'T FOOL AROUND

We have dialogued, bamboo and I.

Since I moved here the bamboo (the 3 meter tall 2 cm thick mountainside kind that creates an impenetrable green wall traversable only by wild pigs, foxes, pheasants, ferrets and snakes), I've learned much about bamboo relentlessness and singleness of purpose.

Don't let that subtle yet elegant demeanor, that Asian inwardness, that quietly sophisticated, golden segmented curvature fool you. Don't be deceived by that slender, arching tallness, that timeless sheen. Bamboo works 24 hours a day.

Just because it's made into delicate cages for crickets, or into hair-thick wickets for catching tiny freshwater fishes, or shaved into feathery whisks for ceremoniously stirring green tea into an inviting froth, don't conclude therefore that bamboo is a delicate, effete, lily-wristed wisp of a plant. It is not. It is rooted with cables of steel.

You know this when you live with it growing on the land beside your garden, into which the bamboo subterraneously insinuates itself day and night, sending its long cableroots silently across in the dark a foot or two beneath the so innocently clear-looking soil; then one day when at last you are naively priding yourself on having won your battle with that puny weakling of a plant, your golden nemesis sends up here and there all over your garden its many silent green flags of conquest, which it then proceeds to celebrate with practically visible growth upward. Some species grow a meter a day.

Bamboo is in fact a single-minded, deep-rooted rocket of a plant, with a patience much older than our own; it is so patient that some species bloom only once in a century or so. No need for hurry, when such power is yours. I am temporary; bamboo prevails. And strong? Ask me, who have tried to cut its stalks and root out its roots for years now. It is stronger than earthquakes, let alone me.

It is so strong that in Japan it is traditionally grown like big living mats on hillsides, so that its deep tangle of steel-cable underpinning holds the whole hillside in place while the earth roils and rolls like a just-caught eel. Such strength must be honored.

So although I know that one day my vegetable garden may very well be a flourishing mountain bamboo thicket once again, in the blessing of the meanwhile the green army and I do battle of an ancient and honorable kind, that I learn much from, and do not really want to win.