Nature's Words
This sacred banyan tree is known to be hundreds of years and has been worshipped actively by travellers and Balians in Indonesia. It’s known for the big cavity cut through the middle, called Bunut Bolong. In Balinese, ‘Bunut’ stands for the banyan tree, and “Bolong” means hollow. It allows the important road to be built that connects the Manggisari Village in West Bali to parts of North Bali.
This tree has been sanctified due to the mystical events that happened in the past – it brings bad luck to people who tried to cut the tree. The legend once said that the tree had protective power over the people hid in the hole when the Dutch troops attacked, so that they could not be found.
When I saw this photo, I was immediately drawn by its harmonious and spiritual ambience. It is an image full of vitality, the persevering, and intelligent life force. The mobile prop roots of the banyan tree form the hole that not only fulfils human’s request but also sustains its own life. Without uprooting the entire tree, the Balinese people slid open a hole, just big enough to let all sizes of traffic to go through. The tree has shown its power and kindness to negotiate its living space for humans.
However, we should be respectful to the adaptability of nature, and not to keep testing the limit. The trees provide shelter and resources to the living beings that reside at its brunches, leaves and trunks. They obediently follow the nature’s rules to regulate the balance of life. Perhaps due to its benign nature, the vegetation has outlived us for centuries. Our limited ability to understand the plant world is because of nature. Hence, the history of the trees is unfathomable to us. German author Herman Hesse writes that “when a tree is cut down, and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk…its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness.” Yet we can’t at all read their encrypted diaries. However, eco-poetics have relentlessly dived into the sublime, to search for the unreachable truth. The infinite creative possibilities allow us to join the dots of ecological thinking and aesthetics. A good example, which I particularly like, would be this week’s Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’,
“A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
The concealed, ungraspable truth is poetically embedded in all things. The contemplative words are forever needed, and inexhaustible.
Reference:
Eleveld, Anne. “The Mystical Tree of Bunut Bolong.” Latest News Bali, 14 May 2022, www.balinews.co.id/mystical-tree-bunut-bolong.
Newman, Cathy. “See 10 Remarkable Trees, Each With a Special Story to Tell.” Science, 4 May 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/remarkable-trees-earth-day-pictures.
Poetry Foundation. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,….” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798.