Wood

Cecilia Ramos, Grass Valley Aikikai 

The Tahoe National Forest in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern California encloses many privately owned parcels of land, and I am blessed to own one of them. 

Our 10 acres are heavily forested with evergreens, but we also have some black oak and madrone. We treasure the oaks: they are so pretty in in the spring, stately in summer, and graceful when bare. The madrones are water lovers, so they are always a good thing to have as it means you have water. Of the evergreens, we have ponderosa pine, incense cedar, white fir, doug fir, and silver tip fir (which make the best Christmas trees). 

“Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and feed my soul.”

I love walking among the trees, watching them in all the seasons, and feeling their spirit surround me. We like winter. It is incredibly beautiful when it snows. But at the same time, living with snow is a lot of work. As everyone knows who lives where it snows, snow needs to be managed. Driveways need to be plowed and stairs shoveled. It’s hard to drive in storms. Power goes out and generators quit on you. But the trees need the cold and the snow to grow properly, so living with trees means coping with winter.

As winter gives way to spring then more work ensues and it’s work driven by fear. Forest fires have taken over the land here in the west, one firestorm after another springs up out of nowhere from lightning strikes. The fear of forest wildfire is ever present. The solution is to thin and limb up the trees, and clear the brush, which entails hours upon hours of hard work. An overgrown forest results in spindly, weak trees that are good fire fuel. The process of grooming the forest makes it safer from fire and also causes the remaining trees to grow stronger and larger. 

The mill!

In our dojos we have wood elements. We have wood in our kamizas and our weapons and we feel the spirit of the wood as one of the five elements. We love our wooden weapons with their beautiful grain and the organic feel of them in the hand. The spirit of wood is in our metal swords as well because it took wood to make the charcoal to bake the iron ore into steel.

The second Grass Valley Aikikai dojo

The spirit of wood has within it the tough resiliency of the trees that grew from the earth, and survived the storms and survived the fires. And the wood spirit also has in it the hard work and endurance of the people who with determination and strength lived in the snow and groomed the forest and transformed the trees into wood. Think of that the next time you swing your bokken. 

“Shinrin-yoku

is to walk 

deep into the woods 

where everything is silent 

and peaceful, 

and breathe in

 the volatile essential wood oils 

of the forest.”