By the end of January 2026, it was all over. All the persimmons were gone. 1,686 of the Fuyu persimmons had been given away, mailed to friends and relatives, or donated to food banks for the season. Dozens more had been worked on by the local squirrels, sparrows, finches, visiting opossums, and several persistent raccoon families. Early in the season the starlings paid a visit with some Bulbuls, but I haven’t seen them since October.

We became tenders of two mature persimmon trees on our new home’s property in September 2022. It’s been four seasons of being in relationship with these beings, and I fall in love with them repeatedly. When we’re in the days of brilliant oranges and reds and as the leaves turn and fall from the branches. When bare branches allow us to see more sky in the shortest days of the year. When tiny light green leaves emerge and the persimmon flowers with their unique shape start showing up. That shape which turns into the caps of the fruit. And this time of year, when the leaves are big and dark green and the hint of yellow starts to appear on the growing green fruit. Every season of these trees is something to love and appreciate.

What Are Persimmons?

The persimmon is an edible fruit from the Diospyros genus. Persimmons have shiny, taut skin that ranges from marigold yellow to deep orange in color, and soft, jammy (or starchy) interiors, with or without seeds. While originally native to China, early persimmon trees were also cultivated in Japan and arrived in North America and Southern Europe sometime in the 1800s. The Algonquian tribes of the eastern United States gave persimmons its modern-day name. “Persimmon” is derived from the Powhatan words “putchamin,” “pasiminan,” or “pessamin,” meaning “dry fruit.”

(https://www.masterclass.com/articles/types-of-persimmons)

It’s several months away from harvest, and I’m anticipating a smaller yield this year because we had such a big harvest last year. Fuyu trees are like that, alternating years of higher and lower yield. Even a low yield year provides more than enough fruit for one family, so we’ve learned to harvest, wash, and box the ripe fruit for personal distribution. Giving away thousands of persimmons over the years has created a community of persimmon appreciators. I hear about their love of the fruit and how they use them: baking, jam making, salads, glazes, and pairing with cheese. Some even dry them in a dehydrator or by traditional Japanese methods.

My dad had persimmon trees when he was alive. He also had a distribution system. My Uncle David who recently died was a part of that and would fly down from British Columbia, Canada with room in his suitcase for carrying the hard ripe Fuyu persimmons back home. Of course, they would get some golfing and fun in during the visit as well, but the harvest became a reunion time between my uncle and the Southern California transplants of the family tree. Often brief, those visits provided the renewing of bonds during those years.

Now that my dad and all his brothers have gone from living relatives to ancestors, my relationship with them has shifted. It’s been over 13 years since dad died, and I still have so many questions I wish he could answer. I still run into challenges I’d love to be able to call on him to help me with. I might not agree with his solutions, as was our history, but I would have loved to have his perspective. He set up a great irrigation system for his yard, the infrastructure of which is still working today. Mine is a work in progress. And he wasn’t afraid to dig into challenging dirt and soil full of clay and rocks. I used his advice just the other day when I needed to dig a stubborn hole, “Soak it with some water, more water than you think you need. Then go do something else and let that water work. Come back and dig later.”

His solutions were ones that came from direct experience, not from any academic program or traditional apprenticeship. From trial and error and learning out of necessity not the luxury of curiosity, interest, or personal appreciation. The stories told were a mix of adventure and cautionary tales. Dad told us his brothers used dynamite to blow up tree stumps on the land which became the family farm. My dad with a big mischievous grin recalled, “One of them would dig a hole under the roots of the tree stump after the tree had been cut down, place this small stick of dynamite in there, light it then run like crazy toward the other brothers to watch that thing launch into the air. Boom!” he’d chuckle throwing hands in the air and rocking back. He and his sisters would gather the scattered pieces of wood for the fires to get them through the Winter. Laughter and lightheartedness could hold the same space as gratitude in those stories when recognizing how much ‘backbreaking labor’ went into that living. It was 8 years after being incarcerated by the Canadian government after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and not being allowed to come back to the land they once called home. This was a new start for my grandfather who was in his 50’s by then, the same era I’m in now.

I’ve been reading the family history captured by my Aunt Sumi in her book SHIKATAGANAI: It Can’t Be Helped. It includes a poem my Grandmother Naoye Morisawa wrote in Japanese and gratefully translated to English since I embarrassingly have yet to learn the langue of my grandparents.

Sumi narete tochi owarete sokai suru.
(Expelled, chased out from the land we lived comfortably)
Rokunin no ashi kata nokoshi sokai suru
(Evacuation, six small kid’s foot prints left behind.)
Sutsu kaisu sageta kodomo wa ureshi garu
(Carrying suitcases, kids were so excited)
Shin pai wa doko e yukuno ka kane mo nai shi.
(No money, destination not known, so worried.)
Jinsei no ayumi tsuka reta, shiroi hata
(Tired, exhausted of this journey, defeated with white flag)

So, while I get the luxury to decide:

· To choose a destination and move with some freedom which my family couldn’t do at points in history

· To choose what to pack knowing the journey is temporary,

· To hopefully come back home again to land, family, possessions, and chosen occupation,

· To tend to fruit and vegetables to supplement our nutrition and not for survival,

· To learn through story and curiosity,

· To ask deeper questions because I’m not forced to solely survive,

· If it’s now my turn to tell some stories, write some poems, take some photos, make some art, educate those who are unaware, and help us heal from generational trauma.

I’m also deciding what to write, what stories to tell, what is important and why.

The why in a general sense is clear. I am so grateful for the Densho project for intentionally capturing stories and history while other systems work to erase those stories that don’t fit their current narrative or agenda. My sadness and anger of the repeated injustice, minimizing, and denial of the experiences of the victims of systemic racism and violations of basic human rights motivates me to do something or many things. And I’m so inspired by new fiction, memoirs, and essays that continue to be written and told by the generations which have some distance and perspective from the historic events.

This is the seat I sit in, and I’m still learning how to tell the stories and what voice I might contribute to the fabric of understanding, of learning from the past to not repeat it, of hope and determination for a better world for my children and future generations.

I’ll be leaving soon for a pilgrimage, a meaning making journey and tour of historic family sites. The house my dad was born in, the land where the farm once was, the cemetery my grandparents are buried in, the town my grandmother and relatives were born in, and The Nikkei Internment Memorial Centre my family was incarcerated in are on the intended list of places to experience. It won’t be the same as the family reunion a large contingency of my family took in 2009 to New Denver when I was unable to attend due to having a young family and financial constraints consistent with the economic crash of 2008. I won’t have the stories and memories coming to life in real time as I walk on land and breathe the air of the places. But I will have a better understanding of the effects on individuals, community, the Geo-political environment, and relationships through my lens as a descendant who works in the field of healing generational and personal trauma.

The itinerary is being finalized, and my packing list is becoming refined. I’m trying to hold to the spirit of ‘packing lightly’ for this part of the pilgrimage. To be intentional about what I take with me and what I might need to unburden myself with to allow the space for new experience, insights, understandings, and inspirations to be recognized. I’m creating my version of a vade mecum, a personal guidebook to go with me with. I’ll include my grandmother’s poem, some pictures, symbols, dreams, and synchronicities, the values I’m taking, the questions I have and anything else that speaks to my heart and spirit.

From the liminal space between everyday life and preparation for pilgrimage, greetings to all the pilgrims out there. I hope our paths cross, we lose our way, we find what we need, and all will be revealed.

~Natasha

Resources I’m exploring:

Sumi Kinoshita: My family was interned video

SHIKATAGANAI: It Can’t Be Helped by Sumi Kinoshita

A Place for What We Lose by Tamiko Namura

The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest by Satsuki Ina

The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda

Vanishing Clarity by Brandon Shimoda on Substack

We Are Pilgrims: Journeys in Search of Ourselves by Victoria Preston

Densho Project

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Thank you for visiting; feel free to wander around and make yourself comfortable.

This project is coming together out of my affinity for projects and a decades long passion for persimmons only stoked higher since I became a caretaker for 2 mature persimmon trees in 2022. If you don’t know much about persimmons, and are persimmon curious, consider subscribing as I’ll be sharing tips on tending to persimmon trees and growing things in general, recipes, art, writings, and photography related to persimmons. It’s likely you may have been gifted persimmons and you’re here for more information. Welcome, now you can become part of the persimmon community!

You may also want to know this project may wander a bit, and I trust you’ll take what you want and can come back later when you want more. The reason this might wander is because it all comes out of relationships I have, and like most relationships, it gets wonderfully rich and complicated. These trees and their fruit connect me to the seasons, the land, my Japanese cultural heritage, and my dad. He’s been gone since 2013, but when dad was alive, he too had persimmon trees he tended to. And when I run into issues now with persimmon trees, a budding food forest, or landscaping, I really wish he was here to help. Michelle Zauner wrote of the loss of her mom and had her Crying in H Mart moment, mine showed up in the drip irrigation aisle of ACE Hardware. I miss him.

I’m going on a pilgrimage (or more likely the pilgrimage has already begun) to the concentration camp my dad and his family were incarcerated in during WWII soon. Reading and listening to family stories is helping me to better understand my own disconnections and connections to the Japanese culture. Often, I’ve done this in the backyard between the two persimmon trees, so I feel like they’re on this journey with me. One of my contemplative practices is to sit with the trees and have a conversation with them. If you’ve listened to the podcast I co-host or read other things from me, this won’t be a surprise. Most of the communication happens in symbols and metaphor, and they have been very patient and wise companions on this journey.

It’s time for me to start sharing some of this with a wider audience, and I thought a newsletter on Substack is a nice place to start. The Persimmon Project is a collection, an appreciation, and resource for all things persimmons. And woven in, I’ll be sharing my journey as an American descendant of Japanese-Canadians who were imprisoned in concentration camps as I continue to understand my own story in context with my ancestral history, my knowledge as an expert in generational trauma and family systems, the lens of Ecotherapy, and the current and ever-changing Geo-political state.

You are cordially invited to come along.

I’d love for you to subscribe and be a part of this journey with me!

~Natasha

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At a recent community art and music fair I got asked to sign a petition to save the local trees. I’m not a resident of that city, so I wasn’t able to sign the petition, but I looked for other ways to get the word out there to people who are. If you would have walked by that booth with volunteers collecting signatures and not stopped, if saving trees isn’t showing up in your social media algorithm, if you look around your neighborhood today and can’t identify many of the plants you see, you may be suffering from Plant Blindness.

In the next city over, there is a struggle to keep 193 mature trees from being taken down in their prime for some fire remediation. Well meaning people are making decisions that seem to be uneducated without calling in specialists to answer some important questions. I want to believe people cutting down trees are making the best decisions possible. But I’m afraid they might be making decisions while under the influence of an affliction called Plant Blindness or Plan Awareness Disparity (PAD) which can impair one’s judgement without even knowing it.

Plant blindness/ PAD is a form of cognitive bias where humans ignore the plants around them and under-appreciate them by not recognizing the importance of plants in the biosphere. We don’t recognize their importance to our existence let alone the wider biome. It’s a fascinating phenomenon and has very real impact on our health and the health of our changing environments. What we ignore, we don’t even consider in value-based choices. And like other cognitive biases, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Speculation about why we are afflicted with this condition includes the tendency for humans to be zoo-centric, placing more value on living things that move and have faces. Plants being generally still, don’t fall into our field of consciousness or connect with us as easily. It may also be those of us in western industrial complex environments have been disconnected from the plants around us for a while now.

When apples appear in bins,

when we know coffee beans only as brown, ground, and the flavor of the hot water we drink,

when cotton comes in balls or threads of a shirt,

we have long been disconnected to the plants

with roots in the ground,

leaves that perform photosynthesis,

the insects that pollinate,

and the slow growth of flower,

berry,

and fruit ripening.

If your basic self-assessment comes up that you have Plant Blindness/ PAD, there is good news. The treatment is simple and the effect can be complex and life altering. Opportunities to reverse Plant Blindness/ PAD abound. It’s likely right outside your window or door is a plant somewhere. Start there and just notice it. Find out more about it.

Or you may have already been noticing birds since the pandemic made many amateur ornithologists out of us. Just beyond noticing birds is noticing the bushes and trees they call home and the berries and bugs they eat to survive.

Do you know where your nearest botanical garden is? You will find others there actively reversing their Plant Blindness/ PAD. They can help; you don’t need to go through this alone. In fact, it’s not advised, so take a friend, take your mom. Maybe get a membership and take your first dates there, even if the date goes bad or you get ghosted, you’ll still be tending to your growing relationship with plants.

More resources to cure your Plant Blindness/ PAD:

https://psmag.com/news/can-plant-blindness-be-cured/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190425-plant-blindness-what-we-lose-with-nature-deficit-disorder

https://edgeeffects.net/plant-blindness-and-seeing-vegetal-timescales/

This Abandoned Lot is Full of Useful Plants!

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I’ve been invited to be a breakout session facilitator for a group of high school teachers. Not any teachers, but teachers who teach in a creative arts high school, in Los Angeles, in 2026.

I’ve been told that Social Emotional Learning is a topic of interest, and that it’s their end of year in-service. So, I’m thinking they might need to decompress, tend to their own social emotional needs, and get ready to transition. Some may be considering or reconsidering if they’ll return to this institution, to this field, to this life as they know it. Some may need a break to reconnect with a personal life knowing the next class, semester, school year will be here soon enough.

Life for many career professionals is full of uncertainty these days. I don’t know one field unaffected by the economic-geopolitical situation or the current and projected potential impact of AI. How are we all doing with this? Minimizing and denying this could impact you? Worrying alone or with a select few? Starting to pivot because you’ve been here before in some way or another? All of the above with a noticeable increase in chocolate savoring, gardening, QiGong, tending to what’s right in front of us, and contemplating what it means to be human? That last category is where I find myself, and it all seems very human and appropriate given the ways we have encountered uncertainty collectively and individually.

I recently read Blake Boles’ new book Dirt Bag Rich: High Freedom, Low Income, High Purpose, and it’s helped me hold a perspective I’ve found helpful especially in these times of transition and uncertainty. It also helps to know there are others who are living the values of freedom and connecting to purpose, real life examples which help untether me from the version of life I can find myself attached to.

It’s such a human thing to become attached to the way we think life should be or should go. I can’t always think my way out of those attachments without first recognizing I’m attached to something, that’s where mindfulness or contemplative practice comes in useful. Then I often need something external to help me shift. It could be talking to another trusted person who sees life differently than me, having a novel experience, or in this case, reading a book.

When I think of anyone who is tending to our youth and adolescents in 2026, I empathize with the situation of being an adult who may be going through a parallel process of trying to imagine what we’re going to do with the rest of our lives. What is the best investment I can make now for a future which seems so uncertain?

I’ve used a metaphor of walking through a forest in a blanket of fog before to manage the stuckness which sometimes shows up with the fear and confusion uncertainty can bring. When you find yourself in a forest with fog and you can’t see the path, take a step in any direction. You’ll start to see just a little bit farther than you could see before that step. It may be the path ahead of you or you may realize you’re not on the right path at all. That information becomes valuable in giving more clarity to discern a direction for the next step. It’s been a helpful metaphor for myself and others who get caught in the indecisions or the need to know what the “right” direction might be. Some of us have a really hard time taking the first step if we can’t see the whole path, so this metaphor can be helpful to just start.

In Dirt Bag Rich, Blake invokes a different metaphor of the lily pad when it comes to life, jobs, and the next direction to put effort into moving on with life. I found it useful in exploring options with people about what they’re going to do when they cannot physically, emotionally, or spiritually continue what they’re currently doing, or if they have encountered a change they didn’t ask for. Being fired from a job or laid off from a career that no longer exists brings up so much uncertainty, and the longer you’ve been doing that job or career, the likelihood it will impact us emotionally, socially, and mentally in ways that are disorienting increases. It’s also likely to encounter this disorientation when you’re experiencing burn out or moral injury and you know you need to make a change, but haven’t been able to do that yet.

And it doesn’t have to be job or career related, any life transition comes with a liminal period where life isn’t what it used to be and is not yet where it will be. Death of a loved one, marriage, raising children, managing chronic illness, graduations, opening or closing a business, divorce or breakup, care-giving for another being, moving where we call home, these all have times of uncertainty and likely there are multiple areas of unknowns.

So, what if for now, we think of the next thing we do as a lily pad, as that thing that keeps us afloat, lets us sit and take a look around, not our forever home, just a safe enough place to land before the next hop, jump, or big leap?

Notice what that feels like in your body. If it’s resonating, let’s keep going.

From the lily pad perspective, we can float on something which has roots deep in the ground under the water, you’re not just floating aimlessly on a current. For some people this is the time to ask “what matters to me most?” What are the important values in your life that go with you no matter where you are or what you do?

If your lily pad job pays some of your bills and gives you time to explore which lily pad you may want to hop to next, then so be it. If the lily pad you find yourself on is sharing space with someone as a guest before you find your own lily pad, be there now and know it’s not forever. Your next lily pad may come with a small to medium amount of resources like a severance package or an inheritance, and you may have the opportunity to explore the world from there, groovy. The point is to allow the lily pad to give you some place to land and adjust to life being temporary, practice taking trips to the next potential lily pad, expand your comfortability with being uncomfortable, and enjoy life a little or a lot.

From the lily pad perspective, we can rest in increments and we can look out and observe the world. We may find we have a healthy form of non-attachment Buddhist Psychology incorporates. We might take a little swim and come back, or do a deep dive into water we have yet to explore. You may find other lily pad hoppers, learn from them. After a few changes of lily pads, you may look back and see you were on a path all along.

May you find rest, may you find joy, may you find connection, and may you find the core values that keep you afloat in these lily pad days.