The Bamboo at the Temple

The bamboo forest, Oita, Japan, Nov 2025

I climbed up the muddy hill into the bamboo forest at the Japanese temple. Looking up, their leaves clustered overhead, forming a ceiling. 

I'd seen these bamboo trees every day. In daylight, they shone softly, swaying and rustling when the wind picked up. I always noticed them, but only in passing, as I went for a run, started the car, or pulled weeds from the garden. They were part of the background, something stable and constant, easy to look past.

Now it was my final night at the Buddhist temple, and I had come out here deliberately, like something I should do before leaving.

Kyoto has the famous Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, where tourists swarm shoulder to shoulder, cameras raised. Here, it was just me. I reached out and touched the bamboo, feeling the coolness and smoothness under my palm. Knocking on it experimentally, the sound echoed — hollow and solid at the same time, like knocking on a watermelon. I wrapped my arms around one trunk and felt its steadiness. Maybe tree hugging wasn’t such a strange practice after all.

I traced the nodes with my eyes, evenly spaced up the trunk, and noticed how it bent slightly as it rose higher. I tried to shake it. The trunk didn’t move, but far above me the leaves trembled, rustling softly. 

The monk’s voice called out.

I glanced around one last time, snapped a photo, trying to use the camera to appreciate the moment more fully, even though I knew it never quite works that way. I wished I had more time here. And then the thought turned on itself: I’d had ten full, open days. All the time in the world, really. Yet it was only in the final hours, once the ending felt close and real, that I’d made the effort. I’d just finished a book about the magic of presence, but it took a deadline to make me present.

My days had easily filled themselves — pre-dawn meditations I debated skipping, exams in the dim kitchen, making udon, tea ceremonies, silent car rides to the onsen with that book playing in my ears.

When it was there, I didn’t appreciate it. I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but knowledge is different from feeling an ending approach. Once the feeling arrived, I scrambled to savour what remained, but it was already gone, already missed.

Peering up at the bamboo from afar, I took one final look. The bamboo didn’t seem to know I’d hugged it. It stood exactly as it always had.