The Art of Caring Slowly
This Tree Will Outlive You (And That's the Point)
Hi friends!
This piece was published last week in Notes From the Inflection Point, my Substack with Lou Baker about climate emotions and seeing our environments afresh, again, and with agency.
The Sycamore Gap Tree was “never just a tree.” It had moments of celebrity, like appearing in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But it never lost its integrity, standing guard 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, a chainsaw tore across the night, the hills, as two men turned this monument to patience into timber. With a crack, a rustle of leaves still on their branches hitting the ground, the sky looked bigger, emptier over the remaining stump.
For many, this 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 would later remark.
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.
Caring slowly, not less, and with intention is an ongoing practice for me. My anxious brain is trained to notice what's “urgent” and miss what makes life vital: the kindness of friends. The kindness of strangers.
Play is how children learn to be in the world. Maybe it's how adults can remember our own vitality. The men who cut down that tree couldn't imagine hundreds of years of history. What if we tried?
What if, in practicing slow care for imaginary trees, we rehearse the patience our burning world desperately needs?
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 tends a multi-acre urban farm and garden, for teaching him that appreciation of nature is itself a practice. Now, he shares this love in work like The Bonsai Diary—a game that allows one to “grow a tree with ink.”
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.
The bonsai we trace may span imagined centuries, outlasting any single Grower's lifetime. We are practicing care for timescales that dwarf 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.
We, too, are finite creatures made of carbon and cells, stretching toward light.
Creative Coalition: June 9, 16, 23rd, 6-7:30 PT
Note: The game includes themes of transition (death).
In June, I’ll be offering a very simple drawing, reflecting, and sharing exercise based on Gene Koo’s The Bonsai Diary. 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.
Unlike the usual monthly gathering, this will unfold over three Mondays in 90-minute sessions. We’ll have a lightly guided practice, and then cycle through prompts and sharing exercises.
Base Rate: $30
Light Hive Readers may use code: Hive50 (50% off)
Paid subscribers get this for free! I’ll send the sign-up code in the paid chat later today.
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please email for the link.
Also: Gene is about to launch a Kickstarter for a bound copy of The Bonsai Diary!
Takeaway Practice
Sloth care.
I want you to take a nap. Seriously: schedule it if you must. You (yes, you) deserve rest.
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Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) holds a PhD in Performance Studies and is not a mental health provider, nor an authorized teacher within any Buddhist lineage. Through Light Hive and as co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, they write to share reflections and practices amid ecological and social uncertainty. Logan is listening to Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” on a loop. Gravity always wins.