Unconditional bonsai love?

Failure as a guardian is the strongest feeling, mixed with guilt at selfishness and also curiosity about green ethics? Can I throw away the bonsai now that I don’t like it? Or should it have every equal opportunity to live? And live with me, the person who initially adopted it and loved it unconditionally?
While away for 6 weeks my work-mates in the crowded work space ignored the bonsai. By all accounts it was very close to dead. So it was whisked away from them by another more observant work colleague and placed downstairs where it was daily placed outside, by a third and very diligent colleague, so as to receive sunshine and likely lots of rain as well. The plant has flourished!
Really flourished! It’s now a mass of green fronds and tilts extremely to one angle as the starved death throes of a plant, eagerly sought the sun. It now looks to me like a fluffy misshapen ball of green with no elegance or sophistication. Alive yes, irrefutably. But no longer a bonsai. On my return it was proudly given back and sits on my desk as a large green blob. Clearly the Cambodian staff member who happily adopted it didn’t know of the bonsai concept or maybe the plant was so naked and unhappy it was impossible to even see the shaping that it had had. So the plant has been saved. While the bonsai has not been saved.
Bonsai is all about shaping the natural tree but placing it in a restrictive environment. Branches are stripped from the main trunk and remaining branches are made into a specific shape. Not a good attitude to have to the tree, is it? The concept of bonsai in Cambodia is rough and ready even by gardeners, as the concept is vaguely adapted by Cambodian gardeners who saw the idea come here with Chinese gardeners. Yet my original bonsai was charming despite it only being worth US$2, bought at a nursery near the work office. There is a logic in my Cambodian colleagues not being aware of the pruning that would have been required to maintain the bonsai.
Now the dilemma is do I put up with the misshapen small shrubbery on my desk that no longer relates to the concept of a bonsai? Or do I live in a materialistic culture where I ditch it by giving it away and go and buy another plant more to my liking. Probably not a new bonsai as the concept now bothers me; especially as I am selfishly rejecting the new non-restricted bonsai even more, than the original highly styled little plant, did already slightly bother my ethics.

Almost but not quite killed, the bonsai!

Introducing some plants into the office for greenery was spontaneous idea one Friday afternoon. $8 later a bonsai a foot high in simple green oval pot, a single stem variegated leafy plant and a shrub were added to a shared office room. As a new staff member the action was treated with distrust by colleagues; what was the meaning of my action? No one else had been so outrageous as to add their own plants!

Within weeks confetti of small dark leaves scattered around my computer. The bonsai was seriously unhappy! This well established, distinguished decoration out of living matter is struggling. A nude dry bonsai is no joke. No one can take the bonsai in, without wondering what the ….?, as almost all its wealth of greenery swirls in the fan’s breeze. Three remaining upper branches with leaves sat above spindly naked arms. Should I take it home into a cooler, airy environment? Clearly its unhappy in its new environment. What to do? Exit humbly or wait and see what happens. The distress had stopped two thirds along the bonsai or yet to die? Cruelty to the human spirit, to watch that shock of new environment onto the bonsai, that was already loved by so many in its short-term addition to the space.

A few more weeks later light green scatters over the lower branches. A miracle of growth! Seemingly arriving all at once after a weekend of its quiet without humans, the tiny sprouts indicate new life. The bonsai has rallied its spirit! Slowly slowly those shoots develop into small leaves. A different dilemma emerges, as the bonsai gains in confidence, the human need to constrain and consign some of those shoots to death; all in the name of keeping the bonsai in the elegant style previously created. Snipping some of the green shoots away so as to keep the shape, does no harm thankfully.

Joining a new space and creating a way to grow into the new environment can almost kill! Yet the wait for acclimatizing is worth it. The partial breaking of spirit, of almost giving up on settling in is on public display as also is the gaining of some equilibrium and tentatively setting forth with one’s own new green shoots of ideas; some shoots will be nipped away immediately all in the name of maintaining harmony while others will be allowed to flourish, contributing to the overall effect.

Sentimental; where is that hat?

Home is where my hat hangs. I have said this many times to the eternal question of where is home, as I have criss-crossed over Australia for work and leisure and now living in Cambodia since 2005. The idea of home was so simple when younger. Where ever I had my meager belongings, including the above quoted hats, was home. I had no ongoing connection to the country town where I completed my schooling due to family breakup and the eventual relocation of both parents. Conveniently they ended up only 3 hours apart on either side of Sydney so over the years I have got to know Sydney as I visit, individually, family. Having never lived in or near Sydney though, it’s not in anyway ‘home’.

The last two times I have visited Australia I lived in a remote Cambodian province that was far from the bustling modern Asian capital of Phnom Penh. Far away physically and culturally from fast internet, bookstores, daily newspapers and groceries I immediately loved the remote location and in 3 years my happiness and sense of ‘home’ only grew. It was definitely and easily where my hat was hanging!

Then the change in where and what was home, as I acknowledged it was time to move on, took place. The change was due to wanting new work challenges and time for cosmopolitan distractions such as art galleries, opportunity for making new friends, options for exercise and a fast variety of food.

But now 3 months after the relocation to Phnom Penh where is home? My hat is hanging in a charming, homely and secure apartment in inner city. Yet is it home? Its not home in the simplified way that Ratanakiri was immediately and absolutely home. Now I confuse myself, as I vaguely think of home as Ratanakiri. It’s vague they as I not really believe its home. It’s where I felt at home but already the town has moved on without me and it’s no longer where my hat hangs. Physically I am here in the city but I feel like a long-term visitor.

How complicated when I also think of Australia as home. My hat is not hanging there?! I will visit there for 6 half weeks in the southern hemisphere spring and I am really looking forward to it. Will it be home? It will be emotionally wonderful to be in Australia but intellectually distressing as I try not to take the materialism and bureaucracy as criminal behaviour by compatriots! Aaaaaggh, where is home! I panic at times? Have I lost home?

It’s complicated now. I liked the simplified time of having the ‘where my hat was hanging’ definition. What has happened to that sense of space and place as I get older? There was no agonizing over definitions of home in my 20s or early 30s.

Very traditional Buddhism believes that if we move too fast and too many times, our spirit will lose itself as it moves slower than our physical body. Such a concept might suitably be used to guess that my spirit is still making it way down along the Mekong River, as it leaves our northern home of Ratanakiri. By the time my spirit rejoins myself, maybe I will know where the hat is hanging.