Following the String Course

I have still been thinking a lot about the Sea of Trees from Tuesday. I am haunted by the poet talking about blue and red pieces of thread. Apparently, those who go into the forest to commit suicide often tie blue plastic threads to the trees so that they can either find their way back or to show the park rangers where to find their body when they are gone. In his poem, the poet contrasts this with the idea in Japanese folklore of invisible red threads that tie our souls to one another.

This reminds me of red arteries and blue veins, circulating our body and maintaining our lives. Both are red, but it is not obvious, because the blood going back to the heart in the veins appears blue. How close life and death are, a constant cycle of red and blue, neither more important than the other, both equally necessary, all the time. Without one there is no other.

I like the idea that there is always a lifeline, right to the last minute, that there is always the hope that in the deathly forest they can find life. The lava may have driven life from the mountainside, but life returns. Not pretty, perhaps, but it adapts. It finds a way. I pray that everyone who goes to the forest finds there way home.