Mountain stage -  

wind sings 

bamboo dances 

Arms waving,

wild dancing - no mistaking 

plum tree joy

PERFORMANCES

The way the kinmokusei trees move in the strong freshening wind you can tell they've just realized the first edge of Spring; their movements are no longer stiff and unwilling - snow-shedding, as before - but softening, stretching, somehow greener and more alive, once again in sync with the earth and its activities; much like me. They even seem a bit playful with each other, like baby animals are. As I watch them I feel that feeling in myself, somehow...

Even the curled brown leaves of last year that have been lying apathetically in the field across the road since autumn are now whirling giddily in the road like a spontaneous Maypole dance with airy ribbons, a merry-go-round of all the whirling ring dances that have always celebrated the return of Spring, warmth and life from the land.

You really gotta watch it these days, there are performances everywhere.

EXALTATION

Yesterday morning I was over on the other land clearing up the last of the new firewood, my eyes looking at the maul and wedge, the grain of the oak sections I was manhandling or among the downed branches for limbs of worthwhile size, hunched over and gazing downward all the time, without thought, rapt in the mu of continuous and autofocused labor, when for a break while edging my way through downed branches I stretched, looked up and there beheld, rising into the blue, all the gold of the tall old ginkgo tree that stands beside the pond, arms spread wide as though reaching to embrace the sky, reveling in existence like an exulting dancer covered in golden feathers tingling in the air--

All that bright and sudden yellow alone amid the evergreens-- it stopped me in my tracks, snatched my emptied mind from mundane tasks and filled it to the brim with things that made me reach for understanding, comprehensions beyond the brackets of my life and its reaches, it was splendid to stand there, as if new, before such living beauty, beauty offered without reward. This was a wild ginkgo, in its native autumnal costume.

Perhaps the most anciently originating tree species surviving today - a living fossil in fact - ginkgo [from the Japanese gin (silver) + kyo (apricot)] must have been showing their gold to empty air, in the eons before we humans came along with our burgeoning capacity to enjoy-- and that's where it hit me, right in that capacity. It wasn't art, it wasn't scenery, it was just a tree but more, arms reaching for heaven just as ours still do in the reflex of high emotion, an ancient stance for both tree and man-- I just stood there and looked at it long where it stood, a single yellow tree against the dark green mountains, but what a gift to a tired man, a break from labor, an opening of mind, an exchange of languages ancient before my time...

It was almost as though the ginkgo had been standing there quietly all along, holding its pose, waiting-- somebody's gonna look up any minute-- wait-- wait--- now: there, he's turning: ta-DA!! It was like that, it was a communication that happened, I don't know why or how, and likely never will, but the ginkgo was telling me in unmistakable terms about humans, color, dance, trees, art, time, knowledge, thought, communication, history, life, patience, it's a long list, and just days from now that golden gift of leaves will all be fallen. I have to go back again. Why does this tree want to tell me so much?

WATERY FLAMES

And this morning too, after the nights’ rain I watched in the cooling dawn the vapor rise in great white gouts like reaching hands, a dance of cloudy spirals and watery flames above the deeper mist veiling the backdrop of the darker mountains, plunging into abrupt and sinuous relief the formerly two-dimensional dawnscape, scribing ridges, defiles, groves and the taller, ancient trees with the stroke of a mist-brush plied with the grace of a dancer, the dancer that turns in all water, leaps in all sky.

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.