At the base of the pine / 松本

It's become clear to me that it would be good to articulate where I'm coming from as I write about religion and trees. This is something I do in my classes, where I ask students to write an "eco-spiritual" self-portrait in our first week together - and I do, too. It seems important for my book too. I'm not a botanist or an arborist, have never lived in a tree nor, come to think of it, planted and tended one. I'm not even given to hugging trees. Why should anyone be interested in what I think about religion and trees? The point isn't that there's an objective or best vantage here - trees, and treescapes, differ widely. But I grew up knowing of this diversity, and - in the coastal desert of Southern California, where, I found myself writing, "every tree was a miracle."

The most miraculous trees were our precious neighbors, the Torrey Pines, perhaps "the world's rarest pine tree," who carve out loopily sublime silhouettes on sandstone bluffs against the sea, eloquently expressing the ardors and joys of existence. I will have come to know them at the same time as their most famous chronicler, Japanese American artist Tsuyoshi "Mat" Matsumoto, whose pencil drawings have come to define them. 

Reading up a little on Matsumoto I learned that he was born in Hokkaido in 1908, going back and forth between Japan and the US many times before winding up in retirement in La Jolla charmed by the Torrey Pines. Child of a Christian mother, he studied not art but theology. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he studied theology and music at Union Theological Seminary in the 1930s, returning to Japan to work as an organist and active as a Christian pacifist. As militarism grew, American friends brought him back to the US, where, after a few years ensconced in the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, one of his Union classmates helped him find a position teaching music at an American Missionary Association-run school for African Americans in Alabama. 

When the war broke out, Matsumoto was arrested by the local police on suspicion of espionage, only released with the help of missionary connections. He taught Japanese language at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago, after the war enlisting in the US military and teaching at the famous Monterey language institute. He became a US citizen, but returned to Japan, where his wife had spent 8 years unable to secure a visa. Based at the US military base at Yokosuka (near Yokohama) for two decades, he raised a family and exhibited art (abstract and expressionist work!), returning to New York City on retirement. Drawn by the Torrey pines, he settled in La Jolla, where he opened an art gallery. He visited the pines daily from 1973 until his death in 1981, leaving behind hundreds of drawings. 

The various accounts I've cited here, which to an extent cite each other, differ in emphasis and diverge in some details, especially concerning his work as an artist. Did he run a gallery in New York before the one in California? Was he self-taught - guided by the pines themelves? Or is that, during the 1960s in Japan,  Matsumoto began intensive study of pines, the Japanese symbol of good luck and longevity—there was also a personal element in that “Matsumoto” means “root of the pine.” One way or the other, I suspect he helped other visitors to the Torrey Pines to see them as Japanese see pines, as rugged, deep-souled survivors in an often cruel and inhospitable world. I know I see trees - not just pines - that way, too.

(Images from here, whence also a random religion-and-trees factoid

those trees in the screen-like spread at top, which stood at now bark beetle-ravaged High Point in TPSNR, had been christened Matthew, Mark, Luke and - the big one - Mary. )