How to Care Slowly with The Bonsai Diary
This Tree Will Outlive You (and that’s ok)
You don't have to touch something to grieve it. Or to love it.
The Sycamore Gap Tree had moments of celebrity, like appearing in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But it never lost its integrity, representing newly-wedded lives or where the ashes of loved ones were scattered.
Briefly, its wide branches even sheltered the men who would destroy it.
In under three minutes, the night, the hills, echoed with the sound of a chainsaw as two men turned this monument to patience into timber. With a crack, a rustle of prematurely falling leaves, the sky looked different, so big and empty, over the remaining stump.
For many, this act of destruction deepened a hard-to-name sorrow about the pace of loss.
“It’s almost as if someone had been murdered,” one of the guilty cutters would later remark.
Environmental anxiety, concern, grief recedes and returns. We see a photograph of a glacier that no longer exists and go to work. We make dinner and read about species we never encountered and now never will.
Especially when so many of us are running at fever pitch or burning out, I think it’s okay to feel…whatever you feel about our air, soil, landscapes, and the creatures that live in them.
If it’s like the discomfort I feel, I offer a reframe: what if the challenge is forgetting how to care slowly, instead at the pace of crisis? Go slow to move fast.
This might sound abstract until you consider the Sycamore Gap tree was, as Mark Brown writes, “never just a tree.”
Where I’m going next—an imaginary tree—might sound silly when real forests are vanishing, burning. But play is how children learn to be in the world. Maybe it's how adults can remember.
Gene Koo's work provides a laboratory for working with ourselves as nature, not mere consumers of it, through centuries of caretakers. A container to practice the capacity to love what's fragile, to stay present with slow processes, to revel in quiet acts of devotion.
Lineage runs through this work. Koo credits his father, who now tends a multi-acre urban farm and garden, for teaching him that appreciation of nature is itself a practice. Now, he shares this love work like The Bonsai Diary—a game that allows one to “grow a tree with ink” and reflect upon it.
Diarists are invited to tend to a tree over centuries. You begin with a simple sketch. On each page, you trace over your previous drawing, thickening the base, creating a new branch, watching decades pass in the movement of your pencil, pen, brush.
In a private chat, Koo shared
I like to imagine that if you are willing to make time in your day to just be with a brush or pen and paper, it might add some good to the world.
If we let it, The Bonsai Diary uses imagination to ground us in the here and now. Attention to embodied presence is itself a form of love. And that attention doesn’t need to belong to anyone, doesn’t need to be owned.
The bonsai we trace may span imagined centuries, outlasting any single Grower's lifetime. We are practicing care for timescales that dwarf our quarterly reports and political cycles. As author and artist, the Diarist will determine how different Growers express care to the tree over time.
Games like The Bonsai Diary don’t substitute fantasy for reality; they are invitations to investigate the intersections of nature, time, and ourselves, with as much openness and compassion as possible. We can't enact what we can't imagine.
Imagination helps us care for what feels distant—whether a tree, our planet, or ourselves—in our own time and bodies. Our bodies work in different time scales than a tree. Under even the best and most supportive of circumstances, none of us would stand as long as the Sycamore Gap tree.
And yet we, too, are finite creatures made of carbon and cells, stretching toward light.
If you’d like company in your journaling, I’ll be hosting a group around this game in June. We’ll play The Bonsai Diary over three 90-minute Monday sessions, each beginning with a short, lightly-guided meditation. You do not need to buy it in advance, but it might be nice to have your own print out and Gene offers free community copies at the bottom of the page. We will share with the group as we grow together. Come as you are, with the setting intended to be reflective, open, and kind.
Notes from the Inflection Point readers can use code "Hive50" to participate for $15 but, if you're low on funds, please reach out for the link. If you want to be there, I want you there.
Otherwise, Gene is about to launch a Kickstarter for a bound copy of The Bonsai Diary. Check it out.
Notes from the Inflection Point explores ways to process and express climate-related emotions like love and fear together. With a voice dedicated to seeing things afresh, again, and with agency, we offer readers reflections most Thursdays.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee, and everyperson at Light Hive, a newsletter that shows how Buddhist frameworks and play can help navigate identity and the polycrisis. They hold a PhD in Performance Studies and today they are grateful to have a job, coffee, and avocados.
Thank you so much, Logan, for engaging this work in such a deep and thoughtful way. The Bonsai Diary emerged in response to an off-hand Tweet about inter-generational games, and so it's grounded in that long time horizon that we simply cannot experience except through our imaginations, as you point out. I have planted many trees that I want to outlive me. I think many of us want to do that, metaphorically or literally. And I think that the tree analogy is apt: we may have planted them, but we don't get to decide how they grow, or even whether they survive.
I'd like to sit with your idea that perhaps we need to "care slowly" even as we respond to fast-moving crises. That feels very wise -- that even if your actions are quick, true care can only grow and unfurl so fast. Maybe while the former is necessary, it's perhaps not sufficient to nurture our care, to express our love for the reason why we sometimes must act with such swiftness.
There's something paradoxical about running a Kickstarter, which is all frantic energy and FOMO and attention-grabbing, and the actual experience I'm trying to share, which should be intentional and centered and meditative. I'm not sure it's something I should have done! But I'm also not sure that this game would have otherwise reached you, and that's the contradiction we have to live with, I suppose.
I am very eager to hear about your meditation sessions with The Bonsai Diary. I've had some profound experiences playtesting it with people, and recently I've found that there's great power and connection playing "solo" journaling games in groups. Thank you for elevating what I've created into another space altogether. It's more than I imagined.