The Enjoyment of Nature : On Bigness & On Trees

On Bigness

 

A mountain trip is supposed to have a cathartic effect, cleansing one’s breast of lot of foolish ambitions and unnecessary worries.

Man is liable to forget how small and how futile he is.  A man seeing a hundred story building often gets conceited, and the best way to cure that insufferable conceit is to transport that skyscraper in one’s imagination to a little contemptible hill and learn a truer sense of what may and what may not be called “enormous”?  What we like about the sea is its infiniteness, and what we like about the mountain is its enormity.

On the other hand, by association with nature’s enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also.

On Trees

Houses without trees around them are naked, like men and women without clothing.  The difference between trees and houses is that houses are built but trees grow and anything which grows is always more beautiful to look at than anything which is built.

The pine tree, the plum tree and the bamboo tree are associated with winter being known as the “Three friends of winter”, for the bamboo tree and the pine tree are evergreens, while the plum tree blossoms at the end of winter and the beginning of spring.  The plum tree symbolizes purity of character, the purity that we find in the crisp, cold winter air. Its splendor is a cold splendor, and like the recluse, the cooler the atmosphere it finds itself in, the better it prospers.

The bamboo tree is loved for its delicacy of trunk and leaves and being more delicate.  It is more enjoyed in the intimacy of a scholar’s home.  Its beauty is more of a kind of smiling beauty and the happiness it gives us is mild and temperate.  Bamboos are best enjoyed when they are thin and slender and sparse and for this reason two or three trees are as good as a whole bamboo grove, either in life or in painting.

Among all animals, the only one which belongs in the same category with pine tree and plum tree is the stork because he, too, is the symbol of the recluse.  As one sees a stork, or even a heron, standing motionless in the marshes of some secluded pond, dignified, elegant and white and pure, the scholar wishes that he were a stork himself.

The best way of keeping birds is to plant hundreds of trees around the house and let them find in their green shade a bird kingdom and bird homes. So then, at dawn, when we have waked up from sleep and are still tossing about in bed, we hear a chorus of chirping songs like a celestial symphony. The enjoyment of life generally should come from a view of regarding the universe as a park and the rivers and lakes as a pond, so that all beings can live according to their nature, and great indeed is such happiness.