7AM
A and B meet at a trail head for a waterfall hike. A has an 7 hour layover where B lives. They meet after 4 years part. They had been close friends when they were kids because they lived in the same compound. They warmup awkwardly as they trek. Back then A moved away first and B moved too. They kept in touch for 2 years then stopped for 2 years. As they catchup they realise their lives in the past 2 years were so different.
There was a bit of sun shower. They get to know that their futures are more different. A is traveling and B is settling in terms of job, place, people. It seems to us like they were childhood friends who faded out.
In the silence they look. There are black finch birds standing on Kona trees. Below the stream was brown and rapid because a big rain just passed.
9AM
They got to the waterfall. A brought up the story they wrote online, 3 years ago. Interesting, they created something together. They pulled out the story on A’s phone and re-read it out loud.
A is doing another writing now and encountering similar issues, so A is asking B. The story-writing has a tough and undigested aftertaste. A asks because B both initiated and stopped first.
- A Chinese Fable: “There is a guy named leaf. He thinks he is interested in dragons. so he asks painters to draw dragons on his palace walls. a dragon saw and was like ‘oh how nice he likes me. I will pay him a visit.’ When the leaf sees the dragon he freaks. turns out he liked the idea of a dragon without ever seeing one. he is scared of the real one.”
- Previously I despised leaf and felt like I am leaf. Now I think leaf is actually a scientist in life. It’s good that he does so much to pursue his love, even though his hypothesis (that he loved dragons) turned out flawed. So don’t hold back on loving and seeing the real thing, even if it might prove me wrong or kill me.
They started swimming and catching tadpoles. B explain that the story felt too real. While A was focused on a big message or distracted by a fantasy picture, B saw the character story, which was about two people in love.
- “I still feel like I am sinfully flawed sometimes, like I have to hide my ugliness to not gross out other people. I thought people tend to get away from sick or bad people because they are dangerous or unsettling, and I didn’t want to disturb people.”
- If a question is open and relevant enough, you’d naturally think about it all the time even when you are in other places. I can’t stop thinking about you (through the story) and I feel always moving. Yet writing is supposed to be hard. I feel loving when I can fully pour my emotions and focus into a moment. The lack of distance between us, and from me to this story, that blocked me from writing a good story. Good story requires some cold distance, removal.
10AM
They start drawing together. We realise that A and B’s relationship was very very intense, especially in the 2-year window before and after they parted. The story was B’s way to revive their connection as they form new lives without each other.
- When I sketch an oak branch and transcribe taxonomically interesting narrations, A starts to match my niche vocabulary for "seeing" in drawing (line tempo, frame positioning, cross hatch gradience) to his "seeing" in ecology (leaf edge monotony, branch order, textural difference of last year's budding). Rendering faithfully and the ecological questions were foreign to me, and stylistic choices to emotely communicate or quickly document were new to him. We could begin touching and translating between the languages even though we were not experts in either or both, and one voice is never always better than the other. It was sleek to show decision trees and zoomed windows that visual identification tricks might take us to similar looking trees that come from families diverged long ago, and the easy-to-appreciate intricacy of the leaf vein's distribution pattern. (who designed it so well? probably sun and snow)
- When A imitate my phase space doodle to explain how he lives on inspiration (hirameki) vs intuition, the familiar language with surprising dialect brought me into the depth and adorable messiness of why things that appear similar to me (hiking in the canopy, theorizing about how canopy negotiates) cause big difference in his emotions (happy, drained). He took my template of a two dimension matrix to represent the possible perspectives of each concept (eg pain vs torture). He extended the axes to become continuous and the regimes to have curvable borders, then expanded each regime into a phase space diagram with more substates. The hirameki axis (which means spark, wave, flash in Japanese) and the intuition (or experience) axis have a sensitive critical slope where he feels most free. In the top left with high spark low intuition is a dark blob that is his carcass or cloud because he stretched himself too much. In the bottom right with low spark high intuition is a big bike wheel that takes no thinking or risk for the repeated joy from riding a bike and seeing the world so fast and small. On the critical slope, some hirameki ignites a leap to do something new that turns out more fun than ever, like remembering how ecologists read trees in Nagano then coming to another grove in California to search for old in the new. At once I resonated with the need to push harder to will an ideal world into existence, and I was surprised at how his thinking is at once also actionable, something different or new to me, perhaps a new complement.
- I don't see the tree as a person though, that is not the point. But I do get attracted to hold myself around it in a particular place and position. Like dance. Like we are two magnets and there is a 'norm' or an optimal shape we can be to each other. Or I to it. My hands unbuckle and naturally swing to an angle and hold it. Hug it. I turn around it and see: the ant walking up the curved shoot, the elliptical bud with rich orange at the top, the leaf with not dew but shiny remnants of some gel, the fur that hurts, the symmetrical shadow of the three-leaf, the blue (so so blue) of the vertical river on the reclining trunk, the repeating tree hole that never grew into branch, the falling downwards from the sky kind of curvature or gravity or atmosphere. The pine pod that has a solid core stretched into a wing with skeletal feathers that are half transparent. The stretch mark of the farther away tree that melt into more distinct boundaries like you blowing away the sand. A ball of dirt in between two geometric patches on that tree that when I poke it become exploding like an egg. The initial disgust then realization that all the disgust was just in reaction of dirt which is not dangerous. The new leafs that are so juicy for lack of words but are just flat with bulging surfaces and absorbant. The straight vertical flower flowering so wildly it bends out downwards that guided me home to the notebook whenever I forgot that was my destination or whenever I got scared and started laughing at the sight of the guardian monster or friend. I wanted to have 'many people' thoughts or 'important linear' thoughts and when I became at the other place I was a prophet who said 'ok fine, let me tell you.' I had many branches but I was so focused they were all on one linear path and I always aimed toward the destination. I didn't feel the need to remember or share beyond myself at that moment, not even me in the future, but nonetheless I started writing as a part of the process not for the keepsake, out of intrigue not urgency.
It starts raining. Right after they realise how strongly they feel for each other, they still have to part.
- Even though they want to be close to each other, they each have to be alone. What they want and become anxious without; They survive with their solitude times, their steady and particular work loops, their way of seeing themselves, amid noise. They see the ease around artificial obstacles, and train with hard work and accumulate to mastery. Those views are not fixed neither, they adapt in a special way to their frequent new experiences. Which is why they often seem to have endless time and energy, and come to excellent creations through methodic and directed work.