If you’ve never seen a bonsai before it might strike you as undefinably odd to put a tree in a tiny pot, devote your every free hour to its care and well-being, only to receive nothing back of measurable substance, no sustenance or shelter against the elements, because what you’ve poured your heart and soul into to grow, is simply too small.
But there are good reasons to practice the art of bonsai. And some of them are good for you too!
Nature
We live in a world that is made of either concrete, plastic or a screen. Everything we touch is artificial. The different textures involved with bonsai, of the leaves, branches, bark, roots and soils is stimulating for your genetic-historical senses. It is good for us to physically touch the elements that make up a tree, even if it is only one in a pot that we can control in this busy world we built for ourselves. This doesn’t mean that bonsai is equivalent to just playing in the dirt, however. You still have to take care of your bonsai, and that is slightly more involved.
Care
We are a social species. Caring comes naturally to us. Sure, caring also comes with the hurt of betrayal and the pain of loss, but in bonsai the stakes are much lower, and it is much safer to accept that they are a part of the natural world. Of course, caring is also more than just a risk to feel your feelings. It is also actively engaging with the subject of your care to take care of them according to their needs. They can’t speak or communicate, so you have to be attentive to signs that they are under specific stress or strain. Because we have taken these little trees out of their climates, biomes and evolved environments, most often when something goes wrong it is just because we’ve missed a detail. In the act of caring for them, they become the focal point for you to pay more attention to the immediate world around you.
Awareness
Amazingly, people are quite unaware how vast the sprawl of stars is in the night sky. Little wonder given most of us live right in the middle of artificially lit metropolises. And yet, once you start to care for your trees you become aware of the wider world over your head and the smaller intricate one everywhere around you. You notice how the trajectory of the sun changes across the seasons, the direction from which clouds gather to form rain. The bugs that threaten your tree and the bugs that, though they are just doing their thing, protect your tree by eating the aforementioned villains. You become aware of what to plant in the rest of the garden, to attract the inadvertent defenders of your little tree’s being. The birds and what they do become familiar patterns. Your local area’s weather and how your street’s or suburb’s might differ from the rest of your city. The very different micro-climates in your yard, around your bonsai and the elements that affect that. There is a whole new way of seeing the world you inhabit once you view it from the needs of your bonsai. You form a completely different map of all the different conditions that surround you. And all this time that you spend marveling at every new intricacy, you are also learning to wait.
Patience
The human mind is a wondrous organic calculating engine capable of the most astonishing thing on this planet: thinking. But it needs rest. It simply cannot operate indefinitely. Little wonder then that we feel stretched and tired in a world that bombards our senses with a constant flood of more often than not unnecessary information, pointless deadlines and a spiral of social pressure to outperform the exhausted husk of a human next to you. If a task wasn’t done in a flurry of heads tumbling over heels, it couldn’t have been done right. In bonsai there is no point in being in a hurry. Not even short term goals can be achieved over-night. The trees themselves simply do not change quickly. There is a peace in the journey you take with your trees, an acceptance that change is inevitable, but that it doesn’t come without first making the choices that will only bear fruit, or ramification or thicker trunks later. Thinking creatures that we are though, it’s not like we haven’t found ways to speed up some of the processes …a little.
Problem solving
To the uninitiated bonsai might seem like the sort of affair that traps you between the laws of nature and the stern sedimentary traditions of the long out of date. And in many ways, it really is. But even between those two narrow posts you still need to take what nature has shaped and get to something slightly different and still alive and thriving. Understanding the natural processes, working with care and awareness of and for the tree, and with only enough haste to not burden the tree with too little time to heal from your plans, still leaves you with a lot of room to be innovative. Every tree species is different, and every tree too. And the climates and micro-climates were bonsai is practiced around the world is almost infinite. This might sound terribly daunting, but one of the fundamentals of problem solving is understanding that you always start with thousands of possibilities, and by eliminating only a few you remove the thousands of possible pathways too they might have taken. Learning to think like this applies to styling bonsai as well as keeping and taking care of your trees. It is an invaluable skill to learn and bonsai is a wonderful discipline to hone it in.
Creativity
Creativity is often disregarded as just a mere pastime for frivolous self-indulgent entertainment. Although the accusation of spending countless hours with your bonsai as being self-indulgent can hardly be defended as untrue, the more reverent core of creativity -the ability to align seemingly disparate ideas and form a new path- is fundamental to bonsai in many ways. Bonsai combines horticulture, art, engineering, philosophy, geology, psychology and chemistry. Now, obviously no average person is going to be an expert in all these, but in bonsai you learn enough to balance your weaknesses with your strengths for the sake of your trees. And it takes some creative thinking to arrange these different disciplines together, whatever the combination of your personal skills and preferences. It’s good for you to both learn and use ideas you might have thought diametrically opposed each other. In bonsai, it’s not just the tree that grows.
Self-expression
Bonsai is absolutely open to self-expression. It is after all your tree! Bonsai artists have a myriad of choices and possibilities to play with. And new ways of approaching different species of trees or interesting ideas of combining them with unusual styles are discovered every year. But as self-explanatory as self-expression might be, in bonsai it is also far less self-indulgent. Between you and your tree, you may very well be the sentient one making the decisions, but the tree has veto power. Nature itself is the final arbiter. This does not mean that you can’t be innovative and forward thinking in your approach, only that hubris will result in a high rate of failure. Bonsai will teach you humility with perspective, patience and an open mind, and within that frame of mind the sky is still the limit.
Friendship
The art and spirit of bonsai engenders patience, care, awareness, creativity, problem solving, self-expression and through the mutual practice of these virtues, friendship. There’s a sort of group-think that connects a band of bonsai growers, with the prevailing algorithm being, “Aren’t these little trees wonderful.” It makes everyone super chilled and you can check your socializing box with a very peaceable tick.
Distraction and stress relief
The demands of a job can put strain on you, even if it’s work that you love. The demands of life put strain on you. The world is busy and it is demanding, and there is a lot of wisdom in taking a step back and allowing your mind just to enjoy a hobby. And most hobbies can provide some distraction and with it some stress relief. But no other hobby provides the sensory stimulation that bonsai does, the visual appeal of healthy green foliage, the smell of fresh soil, the engagement of the mind to both minute and wider happenings, the encouragement to understand the real world, the natural world, better. Bonsai makes you think about your choices, makes you plan ahead with the acceptance that you are only in control of what you can control. These little trees are the most wonderful thing in the world. And once you become addicted to them, you are going to want to share them too.