Fill Yourself First
Pass through the first torii of Kasuga Taisha, walk a while along the main approach, and a wide field of grass opens on your right. It is called Tobihino. In the morning there are few people about, and at times a thin mist drifts down from the foot of Mount Mikasa. Near the middle of the field stands one great camphor tree. From a distance it looks almost like a low green hill.
The tree was planted, they say, in 1908. After a large army exercise held in Nara, a banquet was laid out on this field, and Emperor Meiji took his seat here; on the spot where his seat had stood, a young tree was planted to mark the day. More than a hundred years have passed since then. The tree now rises above twenty metres, and its trunk is so thick that several adults joining hands cannot reach around it. Come closer and you see that what looked like one tree is in fact three camphors standing close together — none of them pushing the others aside, each putting out its branches in its own direction.
With no one tending it, the tree has spread its branches at its own pace, a little at a time. In the height of summer a large round shadow falls directly beneath it. Someone out for a walk steps into the shade and stops. A few deer that had been cropping the grass move into the shade as well and settle down quietly. The camphor takes no particular notice of any of this, and this year again it is growing a size larger.
"I have to do this."
The more earnest and meticulous a person is, the more often they come to think this way — under the expectations of those around them, and the weight they have placed on themselves.
But that does not last; and in the end, they come to feel, toward the people around them, "I am trying this hard — why won't you understand?"
Without noticing it, one becomes self-righteous.
So first, let yourself be filled.
Then things will come to be done naturally, without strain.
Let us stop strangling ourselves with our own hands.
The people resting in the shade get to their feet after a while and walk off, each their own way. The tree does not count who came and who left. Since the day it was planted on this field, it has neither hurried nor held itself back; at its own pace, year by year, it has thickened its trunk. That quiet gathering of time is what now falls, as a wide patch of shade, over the grass.