Humane Beauty, Japanese Style

Water.  Stone.  Plants.  Wood.  With those four simple building blocks, the Japanese create traditional Japanese gardens.  Although using only four basic elements, they create a multitude of beautiful effects.  As they create those gardens (a tradition that dates back a thousand years), they provide what could be a course in the principles of aesthetics.  The gardens also provide what could be considered a lesson in our human relationship to Nature.

A basic principle of beauty -- any kind of beauty -- is that it brings into harmony what might be otherwise experienced as being conflicting.  As you stroll through a Japanese garden, you indeed experience a peace, a harmony, even as your eyes are filled with a variety of contrasting textures and shapes:  Stone path, soft grass.  Trickling water, hard rock.  Carved wood bridge, straight pine tree.  Great overhanging willow tree, a tiny splay of small stones.

The plants, walkways, bridges, pools of water, and occasional benches or buildings are arranged not only to provide a heightened experience of picturesque effects, but also so as to slow you down as you stroll through the garden.  I have had the pleasure of visiting a half-dozen Japanese gardens in the U.S.  I admire what the landscape designers have accomplished, even when the moisture and moss that are a feature in gardens in Japan are not available due to a drier climate.

Besides providing numerous lessons in aesthetics, my experiences in exploring Japanese gardens has led me to musings about our human relationships with Nature.  Certainly, designers of Japanese gardens and the people who frequent them display a love for Nature.  Nevertheless, the effects are clearly contrived, even when they are designed to feel natural.  There is not a weed anywhere (even though the hard-working people who maintain the garden are usually out of sight).  Because of this cultivated character, it seems to me that Japanese gardens can speak only partway to our human relationship with Nature.  They certainly cannot speak to our relationship with wilderness -- which by definition is land not cultivated for human use.  There is little sense of the otherness of Nature, or of its value in its own right, apart from human enjoyment.  Nor is there much of the predatory component within Nature.  (Even the koi fish are like giant pet goldfish, with food dispensers in some gardens so that human visitors can feed them.)

Despite those limitations, I would prefer that Nature be loved in this way than not at all.  Also, it would be wonderful if every U.S. city had a Japanese garden as a place for rest and renewal in the often hard and often stressful urban landscape.

In the final analysis, though, Japanese gardens are not a complete home for humans, but are instead places for us to occasionally visit.  They are a refined home for the cultivated koi.  If I had any doubt about that, it was removed by the sign on one garden's fish-food dispenser by the koi pond.  It read:  "Please don't feed the squirrels or other wildlife."

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Have you ever visited a Japanese garden?  What do you remember about it?

The “Seven-Year” Insect Itch

Of all non-human forms of Nature that many people in the U.S. encounter, there is one form that may be the oddest.  Some people consider the species to be just noisemakers.  Other people find the "background music" they make somehow relaxing.  (Maybe they're an acquired taste.) Whatever you think of them, they are the Cicadidae family, or cicadas.

When I first moved to the southern U.S. and encountered these insects, a few southerners called them "locusts." But that is a misnomer.  Cicadas do not come in Biblical-type plagues sweeping across the sky.  Cicadas don't congregate in those kind of numbers, nor do they travel far.  In fact, they are more of home-bodies, their entire life journey extending not much further than down the height of tree and back up again.

The adult form, which makes that controversial drone, looks like a giant green fly that has bulked up.  However, despite the inescapable summer sound of cicadas in the South, we humans rarely get a close look at the adults with their large delicate wings folded back over the body.  What we can get a close look at is the shell-like remnant of the nymphs that preceded the adults.  Rather than emerging from a cocoon, the adult emerges out of the exoskeleton of a wingless kind of brown "bug," which is left behind on the bark of a tree.

When several such remnants are on a single tree, they demonstrate visually the life story of the cicada.  All the nymphs' empty shells will be oriented away from the ground they left behind and will be marching upward (where the adults went to mate and lay eggs).  The nymphs make this short trek partway toward the treetops after having lived underground, frequently for 13 years.  (Sometimes the cicadas are called "seven-year cicadas," but that number "7" probably comes form our biblical heritage, seven being in the Bible a symbol of completion.)

It is this long life underground that makes the cicadas so odd.  We may think that a cicada population is being reborn every summer, but what we see are in most species the offspring of adults who laid eggs several years ago. There are actually multiple synchronized populations of cicadas, each set waiting for its turn to appear.

This could be real inspiration for a science-fiction story.  Imagine a planet on which there are ten sets of people -- each set looking exactly like each other set.  Only one set at a time appears out of a subterranean hiding place.  But our Star Trek crew who has landed on the planet does not know there are multiple sets of people.  As a result, the Star Trek crew becomes totally baffled in trying to deal with the planet's inhabitants.  It would be bizarre, and yet this is happening with the cicadas on our planet Earth!

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Looking back upon your own life, is there something you now see as having taken years to come to fruition and completion?