A Different Kind of Luxury by Andy Couturier

Author:Andy Couturier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Published: 2011-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Growing like thunderheads all summer long, the trees and plants of the woodlands thrive and cover every bit of the mountain until they finally begin to lose their momentum, and in the dark shadows of a forest that has gone through its adolescence and prime, one feels a touch of sadness.

The forest in September is so abundant in foliage that underneath everything is darkened. However, in winter, the trees lose their leaves and you can see through the woods very well. Then the dramatic transformation that a mixed-species forest goes through every year in early spring is truly extraordinary. Young shoots growing from the branches of trees burn like light-green flames, and before long, the forest which had been empty is filled with green leaves. Walking over the pass that leads to my house and observing the changes, I understand the Buddhist phenomenon of “existence emerging from nothingness” and the phenomenon from modern physics of “energy transforming into matter.” I understand that these abstract, philosophical ideas represent exactly what is happening here.

“Energy transforming into matter” is the process of photosynthesis—sunshine energy, with carbon dioxide, creating organic compounds, that is to say plants creating leaves with the energy they have taken in. “Existence emerging from nothingness” can be seen when shoots and then leaves appear from the bare branches of the trees using that potent energy-nourishment. And then in autumn they fall off of the trees and return into the forest, or into the original state of “emptiness” or “nothingness.”

Thus in the forest I am able to learn that these phases of the circulation of energy, the “formation and disappearance,” are common to all phenomena of energy, and this understanding can advance my work in the contemplation of the universe as a phenomenon of energy.

—from “To Learn from the Forest” by Akira Ito

[trans. atsuko watanabe}

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