"Little Forest": When life returns to its original state, life becomes simple and fulfilling

Cycle your bike on a secluded country path with different scenery in all seasons; on a midsummer night, lean on a lamp behind you and read quietly, or turn off the lights to admire the flying fireflies; work in the fields, pick wild vegetables and fruits, and make a variety of dishes with all kinds of seasonal fruits and vegetables grown by yourself: all kinds of jams, sour rice wine, walnut rice, baked sweet potatoes, potato bread... The warmth of hand-made is incomparable to that of any industrialized object. This is not a movie, nor a story, but a kind of life aesthetics and life philosophy that returns to the basics, and it is also a manifestation of The Japanese "Life Zen", which is a Japanese-style secluded life.

Far from the modern way of life, when life returns to a primitive state, life becomes simple and full: spring planting and autumn harvest, sunrise and sunset resting. Having a lot of time with yourself, talking to nature, feeling the truth and simplicity of life, feeling the gift of nature to human beings, this is a very textured life that is close to Zen in food. It is also the way of life that many people yearn for. For you and me, who run around the busy city every day and work in front of the computer, this kind of life makes people feel warm and let people relax their tired hearts.

The pace of life in modern cities is getting faster and faster, and people locked up in various buildings made of cement are far away from nature and away from a comfortable life, living more and more anxiously and more and more nervously. There are thousands of people who yearn for the life of idle clouds and wild cranes, but there are not many people who can truly let go of the worldly pursuit of fame and fortune and return to this simple life. The spring, summer, autumn and winter of "Little Forest" will be the warmest comfort for people who yearn for this.

Ichiko returns to Komori, at first because she escapes, because she is not accustomed to urban life in Tokyo, and she does not like the bustle there, so she escapes back to Komori. In the quiet and pristine countryside, she immerses herself in a state of self-sufficiency full of texture, slowly exploring and reshaping the meaning of her life. In the autumn, Ichiko's mother said to her in a letter: "When I fell somewhere, every time I looked back at my previous self, I found that I fell in the same place every time. Despite the hard work, he always draws circles in the same place, and wanders to the end, but he returns to the original point, which is very disappointing. But each time, the experience is accumulated, so whether it is failure or success, it is no longer the origin. Well, it should not be called 'circle', but 'spiral'. From a certain point of view, it seems to be going around in the same place, in fact, it will deviate from the previous point or the next point, and if so, it is fine. Perhaps, man himself is a 'spiral', going around in the same place, but each time it is different, or up or down or extended horizontally, and the circle drawn is constantly getting larger, so the spiral is also getting bigger and bigger every time. At first, Ichiko didn't understand her mother's words very well, but after she understood it thoroughly, she felt that she should try harder. So later, she left Komori again and returned to Tokyo, because she wanted to choose where to go in her life with a positive mindset, and she thought that if she returned to Komori because she could not stand in the city, it would be a blasphemy against Komori.

And this is also the life topic that I have been thinking about, and I am still exploring, hoping that I can also find the direction of life and the destination of my heart as soon as possible like a city.