Green how I love Green

Green How I Love Green

“Green how I love you green.

Green wind. Green boughs.

The ship on the sea

and the horse on the mountain”.

— Federico García Lorca, Romance Sonámbulo

Lorca wrote those lines about passion and death and the strange green light that exists at the threshold between one world and the next. I thought of them the moment we arrived in Niseko.

Because the green here is not gentle. It is not the polite, decorative green of a park or a garden. It is insistent and overwhelming and extraordinarily alive — the green of mountains that have been growing things for longer than anyone can measure, the green of high summer in Hokkaido where everything that can grow does, urgently, as if making up for the long white winters. It is the kind of green that fills the eyes completely, leaving no room for anything else, and I had forgotten — until two days ago, until this — how much I love it.

Niseko is one of Japan’s most celebrated ski resorts. In winter, people come from everywhere for the powder snow on its slopes — white peaks, packed lifts, the particular buzz of a mountain town in full season. We are here in summer, in the low season, when almost none of that is true.

What is true instead: quiet. A slow, deliberate, unhurried pace that is only possible when everything surrounding you becomes that — slow. Few people. Almost nothing that must be done. The mountains still magnificent, only green now instead of white.

On our first day, our host came across the street carrying a two-week-old chick she had hatched at home — tiny and warm and entirely unaware of how extraordinary it was to exist. She held it out for us to see, smiling. I held it briefly and felt, as I sometimes do in Japan, that I had been offered something quietly sacred.

This is Niseko in summer. A chick in cupped hands. Mountains going green in every direction. Time moving at a pace that feels almost forgotten.

Then came Poe.

It was a quiet noon when a sudden bang disturbed the stillness — sharp, startling, the unmistakable sound of something hitting glass with force. Anton said “a bird “and we all ran to the large window and looked down.

On the ground below lay a Japanese green pigeon. Still warm. Vividly, impossibly green — the exact green of the forest he had been flying through moments before, as if nature had made him from the same material as his world and then, in one careless instant, returned him to it.

We stood there for a moment in the particular silence that follows something sudden and irreversible.

Then we went to him.

We carried his still-warm body outside to the woods and while we talked — about life, about death, about the fragile and arbitrary distance between one breath and the next — I found myself studying him. His feathers were the light, vibrant green of fresh, new forest. His wings not yet fully marked — he was young, a juvenile, the pink distinction on his wings not yet developed. We learned that day that Japanese green pigeons come in thirty varieties, that they drink salt water during mating season, that they are among the most striking birds in Japan and among the least often seen.

Silja named him Poe.

We carried him back to the forest — to the trees he had flown from — and offered his body to the fox we had seen the day before. The cycle of things, continuing without asking permission.

This morning I came upstairs early and saw it immediately: another large bloody mark on the big wide window overlooking Mount Yotei. Another bird. I knew before I looked down what I would find, and I found it — a small body half-hidden in the high green grass.

I washed the window quietly before the children came down. One less sorrow for one more morning. Sometimes this is what love looks like: the quiet removal of something painful before anyone else has to carry it.

I am learning, in Niseko, about fragility.

About how the same green that fills me with such joy also holds this — the sudden bang, the warm body, the mark on the glass. Lorca understood it, I think, when he wrote his green poem about a dying girl and the strange light at the threshold. Beauty and loss are not opposites here. They arrive together, wearing the same colour.

The days have been slow in the best possible way.

Card games in the big shared living room. Long walks into the green. Time spent planning — the rest of this year, and the next one, and the shape of what comes after. My body continues its slow negotiation with healing — the knee still asking for patience I am still learning to give it. But I have found a remarkable body worker and acupuncturist here who is teaching me things about my own body and its particular intelligence that I did not know before.

My yoga practice has been the best it has been since the injury in Korea.

The gym workouts too. I am not fully recovered. I am on my path, which is something different and, I am beginning to understand, something better — because the path requires attention in a way that arrival never does.

I already know I want to come back to Niseko in winter — to carve those snow peaks, to see this landscape in its other season, to understand it fully by experiencing both. But for now I am here in its summer stillness, and I am grateful for what this season offers: the quiet, the green, the slowness, the chick in cupped hands, the fox in the forest, the body worker who listens carefully, the mountains that go on and on in every direction without asking anything of me except to look.

I am sitting in a dentist’s chair overlooking the slopes of Hirafu as I write this, which is perhaps the most Niseko thing I could possibly be doing — receiving dental care with a view of mountains. The green goes all the way to the horizon. The rain is coming in.

Green how I love you green.

I don’t know what the next rainy days will bring. Another bird, perhaps. Another walk.

Another slow afternoon of card games and plans and the particular peace that arrives when you stop trying to fill every moment and let the moments fill you instead.

Life here is quiet and beautiful and sometimes sad and entirely worth paying attention to.

The green wind moves through it all.

And I love it.

Green.