After traveling to Japan this summer, I started to read about the reverence towards tree spirit rooted in Japanese culture, which helped me build the foundation before weaving the 'wood' element. The Shinto religion, which originated in Japan, holds that spirits inhabit trees that reach the age of one hundred years. These spirits, known as Kodama, develop into the tree's personality. In pre-modern Japan, such old trees were regarded with "awe and a degree of caution." Today, these older trees are sometimes marked with sacred ropes (shimenawa) to discourage people from harming or cutting the tree, which would irritate the tree spirits.

Compared to other elements, trees have been conceived as a more spiritual existence with a communicative capacity, not through words but through silence. The secrets were told to the tree holes. in folktales, Buddha got enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree. Trees in the forest are compared with individuals in society. It's proven the trees have ways to communicate with each other: they can send help, in the form of carbon, to ailing members of their group; and they can warn one another about pestilence and disease. They are considered silent and mute only because of the lack of human language. Yet, if trees possessed modes of reasoning, would their thoughts be calibrated to a completely different timescale? And perceive messages from the planet that are beyond human sight and sound.