vi: In Focus
The Branch: living by leaves in Osaka, Japan Patrick M. Lydon and Suhee Kang
One afternoon several years ago, Suhee and I stood on a weedy natural farm in the upper reaches of a small valley in the Kyushu region of Japan. We were halfway into a four-year project producing a film on natural farming, and had just finished one of our key interviews. As we stood in the field, a wind fluttered down through the forested mountains behind us, touching the backs of our necks. A few leaves travelled with this wind, floating down into the vegetable farm, and the wind continued to the lower valley and the city below. Just as the wind became inaudible, we could hear a wee click-clack echo back up toward us, as a train pulled away from the local station. Later, Suhee and I were down there, sitting on the next train. We joked about how the wind had given us a tour of Geddes’ valley section. Well, it was half joking. Perhaps the wind knows it better than we do. Of course, intellectually we know that by leaves we live, but this only brings us part of the way to a true understanding. Where do we find the rest of this true understanding? Nature will gladly illuminate it, but only if we are willing to practice cultivating a relationship— to listen, to see, to touch, to smell, to taste —slowly and attentively. Easy enough on a little farm above a city, far more of a challenge in the midst of that city. Like Patrick Geddes, our work seeks to facilitate relationship-building between people, cities, and the environment, suggesting that every city needs places where the wind rustles through a small forest, and the leaves fall at our doorsteps and in our gardens. These are the places that remind us of what we are part— this beautiful, delicate, always-evolving cycle of birth, life, and death. Japan and Korea already have many small urban forests. These forests are often linked to tiny shrines with sacred trees, some of them well over a thousand years old. These places serve many cultural purposes, but one under-appreciated purpose is in helping human beings acknowledge their relationship with the living landscape, on a daily basis. In this part of the world, we have met many who greet and give thanks to the trees as part of everyday life.
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