I was recently in Japan with my high school graduate, a promised trip to a place I’d never been. My takeaway, besides humid summer heat poaching us in our own juices, is the wild green that took over anything humans left untouched. Hills are a chlorophyl riot, rugged canyons buried in canopies, creek after creek dancing through boulders and shadow. Even in the pulsing core of Tokyo, we’d find a temple and walk a trail through the woods getting there, washing our hands at a bamboo spigot as a form of purification.
I took an afternoon to walk alone because even with someone you dearly love, they need a break from you. I climbed stairs from a street in the small city of Takayama to a shrine, the route beyond the shrine skinnying into a leaf-and-dirt trail under a deciduous sky, insects clicking and buzzing around me. At the top of the hill was a clearing with a flat-faced boulder chiseled with kanjis. I used a translator app on my camera and I got back, “tree spirit.” It was a stone shrine to a tree spirit, which made sense, the traditional religion of Japan being Shinto, its tenets animistic. Spirits called kami are known to dwell inside of animals, plants, rocks, rivers, clouds, rain. If I were to follow a religion that aligned most with who I am, this would be it. When I took another translation pic, I got “block of wood” instead of “tree spirit.” At first I was puzzled, then I realized they were the same thing. A block of wood in itself would be a piece of a tree’s spirit.
Back at home in Colorado, I was 87 days into 100 of walking animal trails in wild places, part of a self-imposed wildlife project I’m working on. At ponderosa pines I’ve been mashing my face into their trunks intoxicated with the candy store smell of terpenes under the bark. Tracks of mountain lions and bears brought me to my knees. This was my own form of worship, extensive interviews with field biologists mixed with time on the ground sniffing urine spots and measuring prints, talking with ants and clouds as if they were people. There’s no reason the practice of science and the belief that things have spirits are in opposition. Science will find that, too, if we look hard enough.
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