Tricycle | Awake in the World

On New Year’s Day five years ago, I planted a handful of seeds gathered from a Paulownia tree that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, fifty years before. The seeds were given to me by Japanese peace activist and painter Mayumi Oda, who was a small child when her country was bombed.

It was freezing cold outside that New Year’s Day. Black hail pelted the roof of the Green Gulch glasshouse where we worked. We mixed oak-leaf mold and old forest soil together in a redwood seed flat and took off our gloves to plant the tree seeds. They fell in silence that frozen morning, dark tears on dark soil. Outside, the ice wind moaned and sucked at the seams of the glasshouse.