A Sacred Tree at the DMZ

This 600 year old Zelkova has a good view of the DMZ and the mountains of North Korea..

There are very few ancient trees in South Korea, and In a previous post  (see link below) I explained why. But some venerable old trees do still survive in places, mostly by chance, and one of them grows very near where we live. It’s a six-hundred-year-old Zelkova that stands on a small hillock beside the village of Majeong-ri, not far from Imjingak and the DMZ.

Because of the presence of the tree, one can be certain the village is a very old settlement. In fact, it sits beside the former main road between Seoul and Pyongyang, which means once upon a time it must have been quite a lively place. But it was surely decimated during the Korean War, and today is a very sad and decrepit cluster of nondescript buildings. But somehow, the Zelkova tree survived the apocalypse of war and post-war reconstruction, and so here it stands today!

Traditionally, almost every village in Korea had a shrine of some sort dedicated to placating the village guardian spirit.  The shrine could take various forms. One was a sacred tree, which would become the focus for the community's rituals aimed at guaranteeing protection, prosperity, and good harvests. The sacred trees often had straw rope wrapped around them, or were decorated with strips of white hanji (mulberry bark paper), white cloth, or coloured streamers.​ As you can see, there’s nothing like that on the tree near us, but there is a primitive altar, on which someone has placed an offering of rice and rice wine.

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Even discounting the traditional animistic rituals associated with guardian spirits, we can obviously still learn much from ancient trees.  One of the most important lesson is being led to consider the longue-durée, the processes that unfold across many generations. As a society, we have very rapidly lost a sense of slow time because we live in the accelerated time that is generated by the capitalist economic system and technological innovation. It used to take at least ten months to sail from Europe to Korea but now it takes only twelve hours by airplane. Social media especially encourages a shallow and fugitive sense of time. Such wafer-thin temporality, which is based on obsessive acceleration, is a key cause of the pronounced sense of alienation that pervades society.  This is perhaps especially true in South Korea, where modernization has occurred at unprecedented speed. There is almost nothing older than one hundred years. Most things are less than  thirty years old. On the other hand, South Korean women now hold the record in longevity. They live longer than any one else, on average. So, this is a society of ageing humans and a youthful environment. Which is why a six-hundred-year-old Zelkova tree is really something very special over here.

But living in compressed time has also provoked a backlash. There is now a ‘slow’ movement in South Korea. This idea originated in Italy a few decades ago, and the aim is to reduce the pace of modern life in areas as diverse as cuisine, holidays, fashion, and work. One website explains:

 Slow living is a mindset whereby you curate a more meaningful and conscious lifestyle that’s in line with what you value most in life.

It means doing everything at the right speed. Instead of striving to do things faster, the slow movement focuses on doing things better. Often, that means slowing down,  doing less, and prioritising spending the right amount of time on the things that matter most to you.

Sounds good! Apart from the use of the trendy word ‘curate’. ‘Curate’ means to organize or present something, and nowadays it is often used in relation to one’s identity on social media. As Psychology Today puts it: “The curated self is a product of the technological revolution. The curated self is the selection, organization, and presentation of online content about yourself. Online has become a canvas to recreate who we are. Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram —take your pick and start painting your dream profile.” But the influence of on-line social media has now filtered back into ‘off-line’ existence, and the term is used in popular culture more broadly to imply that we should identify with the aspect of ourselves presented to or perceived by others. In other words, we are persona all the way down. There is no ’authentic’ self. The result is that we feel alienated from the world and ourselves. So, by using the word the promoters of the ‘slow’ movement on this particular website is surely undermining its raison d’être by implicating  it in the root problem it aims to counter. 

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Here’s another lesson to learn from an old tree.

The Chinese Daoist classic Daodejing, written sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BC,   uses an analogy that draws on the characteristics of the tree and its practical use for humanity by describing the spiritual ideal as “returning to the uncarved block”. It urged people to keep in mind the nature of things before they are ‘carved up’ by language and social convention. This primordial holistic vision is called the ‘Tao’ – the Way. So apparently, already over two and half thousand years ago there was a big problem: we already didn’t live in nature but only in relationship to nature.  The Daodejing hoped to remind people of the importance of being in touch with ‘wildness’; not in the sense of being recklessly out of control but of being in balance or harmony with natural principles. 

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And here’s one final lesson.

The consensus is now that humanly caused atmospheric changes are fast reaching an irreversible tipping-point and it is already too late to stop global warming. So, the goal now is to limit the negative impact on the biosphere in the future, and one suggestion is to start thinking in the very long-term by planning the restoration of primal forests so that trees en masse have the chance to live out their potentially long lives, like the solitary and very lucky Zelkova near us. These primal forests would be protected, and bring none of the familiar economic benefits to a region. Then again, they would offer other kinds of employment in the form of guides, guards, fire-watchers, and maybe even universities for the study of the tree and the forest, and humanity’s relationship to nature..

Interestingly, as Robert Pogue Harrison notes in his excellent book Forest, one possible provenance for the English word ‘forest’ is the Latin foris – ‘outside’. The Latin term Forestis silva described unenclosed wood lying beyond a city wall. But in the medieval period, European monarchs moved to take control of large tracts of woodland because they wanted to protect the wildlife which they hunted as a recreational ritual central to the codes of honour of the aristocratic warrior caste. Therefore, a ‘forest’ became a habitat set aside as a royal game preserve and was subject to strict forest laws so that the trees were put beyond people’s greedy reach. Which is one reason why there are so many ancient oak trees in Britain, for example - up to one thousand year’s old. My country’s royal family and aristocracy were especially zealous in the guardianship of their forests right up to modern times. So you could say that today, once again, this is what ‘forest’ means, although obviously for very different reasons. And so, the medieval European king ironically turns out to be the first conservationist, As Pogue Harrison wryly remarks: “an ecologist today cannot help but be a monarchist of sorts.”

NOTES

My post on reforestation in Korea can be read at: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/the-south-korean-tree-planting-miracle

An interesting article on sacred trees in South Korea is : Robert Neff, ‘Korea's ancient trees’, The Korea Times, 2021/10/24. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2024/01/715_317421.html

For the description of ‘slow living’ see: https://slowlivingldn.com/what-is-slow-living/

For the definition of ‘curate’ see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/202302/the-curated-self#:~:text=The%20curated%20self%20is%20a,start%20painting%20your%20dream%20profile.

Robert Pogue Harrison’s book is Forests (Chicago University Press, 1992).