Touch Some Grass

Scenes from a curious evening.

Dear Reader,

Hello. My name is Marissa (or Mars, like the beloved chocolate bar), and I'm Ethos Books’ new marketing intern ;D Recently, I’ve been involved in the activation of Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, and after a string of strange and tender encounters with nature, I’ve realised that wildness has become the centre of my life, in every sense of the word. Allow me to muse on:

A few weeks ago, nestled beside a crumbling well in the belly of the forest, I listened as Hai Fan, former guerrilla fighter/storyteller/tree-hugger shared about the ambition of his younger days and the compromise that comes with the pursuit of your dreams. We had trekked the Wallace Trail for hours, in an attempt to test out a forest walk programme for the book’s activation launch. Between the murmurs of cicadas and rustling leaves, Hai Fan said something that struck me:

“不管你做到多少，做了再说。做了再说。到了你十年，二十年后，也许你成功，也许你不成功，但是你可以告诉自己，我试过了。我做过了。”

(No matter how much you’re capable of doing—do it first. Just do. Ten or twenty years from now, whether you’ve succeeded or not, you’ll be able to tell yourself, “I’ve tried. I gave it my all.”)

It was a provocation. 

That same phrase echoed back to me unexpectedly, not in the rainforest but in the still of the neighbourhood lake, on a detour off my usual night cycling route. I had brought my copy of Delicious Hunger on standby for some immersive reading when I heard a zipping sound across the surface of the water. After warily tiptoeing around the edge of the lake, I met a curious-looking pack of angler boys on bikes. Fishing rods sprouted out of their backpacks like new shoots. The youngest of them was barely 13. Some playful conversation ensued, and I found something so charming about them— unguarded, earnest and entirely unbothered by the late hour. They invited me to “see one spot, very cool one”, and I, perhaps still under the rainforest’s spell, followed. Admittedly, I found the situation rather fishy but after seeing them grin about the possibilities of the night’s catch, armoured only by muddy knees and gummy shoelaces, I wasn't too worried that the boys were up to much malice. Mischief, perhaps. Truthfully, part of me also chimed to that spontaneity: as a kid, my father would take the family down to a quaint fishing town in Merchong, Malaysia, and I spent most of my adolescent days with my hands stuck in the sand at low tide. We are creatures of habit after all, so in I went, rod in hand. 

We ended up in an enchanting little clearing, scattered with the delicate chaos of fallen leaves and twigs. A subdued green light peeked through the loose canopy, backlit by the streetlamps. It was so fairytale-esque, I chose to believe that it was purely a mystical bunch of light-emanating trees. Sometimes, the only way to keep the magic in is by letting our imaginations go wild. In the centre of the clearing, they unfurled their confused assortment of various baits and colourful lures atop a wide slab of rock by the water’s edge, where they tied their lines with the kind of focus boys their age usually reserve for exams.

I had made an Instagram post just days before, about the guerrillas’ ingenious contraptions: 3 clever life-hacks rainforest fighters invented to survive! In the post I provided a modern example of a contraption we might use in our daily lives: a makeshift lamp, the kind you could create with little effort, simply by placing a plastic bottle of water atop a phone flashlight. But if necessity is the mother of invention, here in modern Singapore, where everything is pre-made, pre-ordered and shipped—when was the last time we had to invent anything? When was the last time we chose to?

Yet, like second nature, as if by muscle memory alone, one of the boys whipped out his phone and placed a bottle over it before resuming knotting a hook in a single continuous gesture. Out here, necessity was surfacing again, instead as bait cast out for the sake of play. The lamp diffused a white glow over everything, and I softened. How precious, to witness raw, genuine instinct of this kind. 

“No matter how much you’re capable of doing—do it first. Just do.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is, what happened to whimsy? To unapologetic, primal, wild spirit? We spend so much time believing ourselves invulnerable for doing things with caution and abstaining from the abrasive, messy, spontaneous parts of living. We’ve traded that sense of freefall for control, but maybe in the process, we’ve lost the autonomy to break out of the boxes we’ve made, colour outside the lines, underthink things. Let the magician keep his secrets. Never mind where he got that dove, just look at it go! Let your fear of doing something be the very reason you do it. Maybe then, we’ll be able to celebrate the untamed parts of ourselves. Till then, you can find me by the water.

Just do. 

Marissa (Mars)

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