Komorebi

Shadows in the Understory (Burress)

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”

– Junichiro Tanizaki

Most mornings, after feeding the animals, I make a cup of coffee and head down to the river to meditate on a little bit of land that I like to think is a remnant of the original forest before the property was cleared to build our home. I find my seat directly under a towering 75-foot Sitka spruce whose long reaching moss covered limbs seem more akin to an octopus than a tree. In graceful sways, she responds to wind like one who loves their body. For the record, and as a public service announcement, it isn’t advisable to sit under old trees because dead or weakened branches, Damocles sword-like, can often transform into widow/widower-makers. In my case, the mornings are usually calm, and most movements come from birds and the river.

  One morning, the breeze started early and my attention was caught by the play of shadows created by the rising sun and the spruce’s movements. With the sun behind me, her branches, needles, and symbiotic moss filtered or blocked the light to create shifting shapes and textured images onto the surfaces of the understory. The Japanese call this phenomenon komorebi and it can be associated with a feeling of calm, belonging, and new perspective. 

As I bathed in the dappled beauty, I was reminded of a thin book that my dad gave me years ago by Junichiro Tanizaki called In Praise of Shadows (1933), a long essay that explores Japanese aesthetics and the importance of light and shadow, especially as it relates to living spaces. Tanizaki writes, “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” 

Holding up my journal to catch the interplay, I was able to see an aspect of the tree without directly looking at her and in the play of light and darkness, another thing was created. If I wanted, and worked fast enough, I could have traced the shapes and captured the fleeting image. To trace can also mean to track as in following an animal’s prints. Who was I seeing from this indirect perspective? (I confess, I often see faces in stones, mountains, trees, and the hypnagogic space before falling asleep.) My mind instantly made out a profile and then just as quickly, I recognized the lesson–in all directions, I am in the company of other beings, those presenting as tree, shrub, bird, snake, and butterfly and those who’ve left their human form. 

I’m thinking of my dad of course, his presence very much in the landscape even though he never got to visit me here in the rainforest. When I say, “Hi Dad…” to the air between the willows and the ferns, I feel close to him and unafraid to talk about the mundane or profound.  Sometimes we just listen to the river.  

I’m also thinking of spoken word poet Andrea Gibson (1975-2025) whose words on love, grief, illness, etc., resonated with so many. She understood the relationship of things through play and metaphor. In the poem “Homesick for our Planet” Gibson invites the reader to consider pattern and then offers a new perspective,  

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window, 

asks me if I know the records in my record collection 

look like the insides of trees.

The third person in my heart is teacher, author, and activist Joanna Macy (1929-2025). In 2010,  I learned about her work in a workshop where we performed, The Council of All Beings, “a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. It aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth, and to strengthen our commitment to defend it.” In a 2018 interview with Emergence Magazine, Macy says, “I have a lot of grief for what we’re doing to our world and to the future. But I know at the same time that whatever happens, there’s nothing that can happen that will ever separate me from the living body of earth. Nothing. It’s who we are, and that is so vast.” Komorebi, like death, is a teaching on perspective. The collaboration of light, tree, and air, suggests that there is more happening than meets the eye. Widening our awareness, to include everything in the field, is available to us and can help us feel more joyful and less lonely because of the endless possibilities of connection to who we can sense. 

If you are missing someone dear to you, find yourself in a quiet place where the sun and trees create shadows of belonging, calm, and beauty. It’s good medicine; I promise. 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/05/28/in-praise-of-shadows-tanizaki/

https://www.coniferousforest.com/sitka-spruce.htm 

https://greenpacks.org/japanese-word-for-light-through-trees/ 

https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/council-of-all-beings/ 

https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/widening-circles/