frog ponds, Studio Ghibli, and playing the rests

Tethered | March

Apr 04, 2025

You’re reading Tethered Letters, a monthly long-form letter on creative faith and faithful creativity. Everything I write is AI-free. Thanks for reading.

Hello loved ones,

I hope you are well, and that the early spring has been kind to you. I’ve been mostly investing in present spaces in March, lovely hours and celebrations with friends and family from near and far, preparing Sunday school lessons on what the church even is anyway, and seeing to what Nick Cave aptly called the “beautiful and sacrificial fidelities” of family life. The world is still spinning on its axis (and maybe off of it depending on who you talk to), and sufferings are still commonplace, and wars still rage, and talkers still talk. But Easter is on its way.

Early spring seems to always be an exercise in hope (isn’t all of this, anyway?) Those of us in northern Indiana who have survived the winter dig our way out of our accumulated blankets to squint and sniff and decide whether it’s time to take the Visqueen off the chicken coop. The siren call usually comes with a false spring of some sort, that seductive balmy 60-degree south wind that somehow allows the sunlight to feel warm instead of just blinding. You wear short sleeves out of doors on your back patio because your body is so deprived of vitamin D. You begin to think maybe spring has come. The buds begin to form on your trees, you spy a red-winged blackbird perched on an old fence post two fields over.

Then Old Man Winter’s like, “psych!” and you come out one morning to an inch of frost on your windshield and a weeks-worth of freezing temperatures that may or may not ruin the early garlic.

But early spring signals the coming of late spring, when the warmth will stay and things start growing. Our days involve a lot of kid activities, but we also make room for the preparations — the nesting, if you will — that we do on our little plot of land.

We planted another wine cap mushroom bed. The girls will take the old one and make it a perennial flower garden, now that the grass has been killed off and the soil enriched by the past mushrooms. We put up some hog panel trellises in the garden and plotted out where everything would go. The rhubarb, strawberry, and garlic beds have shown signs of life, still waiting on the asparagus. The chickens are going like gangbusters, giving us eight eggs a day without fail. It feels like finding gold in the nest boxes at this point, but if I'm honest it always did.

With the south wind and warmth came the opportunity to do a controlled burn of our back meadows. We have done this every year since we planted five years ago. It’s an opportunity to bring warmth and light and strength into the living roots of the dead grasses and forbs we enjoy so much. For the kids it’s a chance to play with fire. In the past, I’ve had to use a makeshift, borrowed flamethrower to get things going. This year, both meadows went up in billows of flame immediately. They were dry enough and thick enough and the wind was significant. The burn always feels like the right first task of the spring: clearing out the old so the new can grow.

The most exciting activity for the kids involved turning one of their fall projects into something new. Last fall they dug a large hole near their treehouse, stuck a dog crate in it, and covered it with a tarp. Ostensibly, this was with the hope of having a cozy cave to hang out in during the winter. They did that once or twice, and thus, my friends, this spring we had a large hole. What does one do with a large hole? Well, many things I suppose, but we decided to make a frog pond out of it.

The kids did most of the work, enlarging a few areas and digging down deeper in one of them (about two feet), with the hope that the frogs will overwinter in years to come. We cleared sharp roots and rocks out of it and added some sand and landscaping cloth, then the lining and river rocks. It's a pleasant little spot, surrounded as it is by field stone and some large logs. Here's hoping it attracts some of those bouncy amphibians this year.

Recently I've been working my way through the full run of Hayao Miyazaki films, after years of being told by friend after friend how amazing they were. It's been a real delight, both because I like exploring new things that surprise me, and because these films are very unlike most modern children's animation.

I've been a little obsessed with them, so perhaps I can be forgiven for hyping up Linnea and the kids about watching one of the films, then choosing Spirited Away as their baptism by fire. In retrospect, I could have picked a more accessible, less weird film than this one — say, Totoro or Kiki or Castle in the Sky. I also didn’t give them any tools to help their experience of the story, or any warning. Their response was fairly predictable, and could be distilled down to: “Um, Dad, what the heck is going on?” I don’t blame them for this, by any means, and I have to admit, I thought the same thing when I first watched it.

If you're not familiar with Hayao Miyazaki, he’s considered an absolute genius of hand-drawn animation and storytelling. The films that he and Studio Ghibli create are masterpieces of the genre, and Spirited Away (the third highest grossing Japanese movie of all time) is consistently at the top of lists of the best and most beloved films from Japan.

The storyline involves a young girl entering a spirit world with her parents, where they are promptly turned into pigs and imprisoned. She finds herself taking a job at a bath house for the spirits, where she goes through many trials before being able to save her parents. Along the way she meets a panoply of weird critters including a six-armed boiler-tender with an enviable mustache, a radish creature who squeaks as he walks, and a needy spirit called No-Face who starts to eat everything and everybody because she won't accept his gold. There's also a sequence with a stink spirit who might be the most grossly animated slime monster I've ever seen. Louisa was eating ice cream during that sequence and decided she didn't want to finish her bowl.

Beyond the oddness of the characters — particularly from the perspective of a Midwestern American family — Studio Ghibli films often don't follow a traditional Western three-act structure, but a fourfold form known as kishōtenketsu (起承転結). This form is not about a single hero pursuing their individualistic journey to actualization of their goals, but about characters experiencing change. The “ki” section is the introduction, “sho” the development, “ten” the twist when something or someone new enters the picture, and “ketsu” the conclusion, when what once seemed random now is tied together and given meaning.

In Western storytelling, the individual is centered. Their desires are the goal, the obstacles to those desires are the villain, and the resolution typically involves them realizing their goals in the end. This might sound like a crass thing, but it doesn't have to be. Many iterations of the hero’s journey have to do with the protagonist realizing that what they want is not all there is, usually involving some sacrifice of their desires or even themselves to save someone else. We all enjoy a well-knit story of this variety.

In kishōtenketsu stories, however, the individual’s needs and desires are diminished and placed within a larger framework, often acting as obstacles themselves to their own understanding of duty, fortitude, or loyalty. You see this represented in traditional paintings from Eastern cultures, where the subject is the vastness of nature and there's a tiny little fisherman in the corner somewhere.

In Western storylines, conflict drives the story and the thing that stops the protagonist is the villain. In kishōtenketsu, change drives the story without any obvious villain. The obstacles, rather, come from the environment. You can't just cast down the bad guy to solve all your problems. You have to live your life, often in slow change, learning hard lessons. And when you return from your journey, you don't get a triumphant finale with everyone cheering for you. You just go back to your everyday life.

Which brings me to another interesting aspect of Hayao’s films: the concept of ma (間), or the pause between things, the idea that what isn't there is just as important as what is. Throughout his filmography, there are stretches where nothing happens. There are silences, and slow walking, and landscapes that you just look at and pan across without any big reveal, and seemingly innocuous happenings that you think mean something to the storyline but really just stand on their own. For Hayao and his team, these “negative spaces” offer perspective on the full, wildly inventive moments of the film. They add a certain gentleness as well, as if we are viewing something sacred happening in those spaces when the action stops, as if underneath the silence life is still at work, in ways we don't see or control.

As a (significantly mid) Westerner, I vibe with this. Just today I took a walk out in our back fields, delighting in the wide open spaces I’ve trekked over and felt drawn to since I was a child, the wide open skies I've often wandered beneath. These spaces are beautiful to me, and something in me stirs when I see similar landscapes in Hayao’s films.

Spending time in a place like this should change you, I think. It should make you look up more often than at your own feet or soul. The place should take its toll on your mind and heart, to the point that you yourself become more expansive. But our modern alienations run deep. I would rather fill the silences in my time and conversation with harried work and hurried words than face the stillness, let alone cherish it. Learned or innate, my tendency is to make distraction my daily bread. I tend toward talking whether I have something worthwhile to say or not, rather than stand in awkward silence — which is only awkward because we think it is and make it so. I want every second to mean something. I don't want to waste my life, so I treat silence as a waste.

As a musician, I once learned by long practice to cherish the rests in music — those moments where silence takes its role, if you let it, and which enliven every note around them. Music itself is an interplay of tone and silence, of tension and release, of melody and harmony. We need the silence to know the tone, the tension to know release, the chorus to understand the solo. I found myself reminding a 10-year-old student of mine about this just last week, the very thing I still need to learn: to play the rests.

Even more these days, we need to play the rests. We need to stop rushing to fill the spaces around us with words and deeds.

Linnea and I recently traveled back to Chicago for a wedding between two very special people, one I was honored to officiate. We realized that somehow, years had flown by since we’d returned to the city after a decade living and working in it. As Chicago rose up out of the landscape, we reminisced over our lives learning and falling in love and forming a family in that place. Then, of course, we hit the traffic and I recalled how awful it always was.

But then we arrived at the wedding location, a beautiful old building with windows on all sides in Oak Park, and caught up with old friends and celebrated with new ones, and we got those two married and a bunch of us cried (and I barely avoided doing so). It was another beautiful reminder to Linnea and I of the vows we have made ourselves, and the trip itself was a reminder of the exciting decade we spent as young marrieds in the big city, and a good confirmation of our country-centric souls.

That decade was all so good, full of chaos and excitement, with little room for the ma we eventually began to crave. Toward the end of our time I was stressed out, worn thin, and unfocused. I was discontent with where I was, intent on striving for the place I wasn’t. It’s taken me a while to recognize this about those years. In some capacity throughout that time I was making myself salable and productive, seeking control by switching out my identity, pursuing online influence. By God’s grace, I was given a community around me that keep my feet on the ground and challenged me that maybe, just maybe, there was more to life than my ambitions.

These days, as we have methodically disconnected our brains from the internet and leaned into a slower, more reflective pace, I feel like I’m waking up to what was always around me — meaning, the present — and finding it much more worthy of my attention than my younger self was willing to admit. I’ve let my attention be deflected from it for so many years, always looking further afield (online and otherwise) for greener grass. I’ve longed for a quest and a villain and a hero’s triumphant return, when most of life is slow change, complicated people, and unforeseen stillnesses. We've been gifted many things, friends.

I don’t know if I have a lesson or an exhortation from all of this, just gratefulness for what has been given over the years, and renewed resolve. I don’t want to squander my days in this place, and it’s too easy to do so. I’m amazed at how bored I can become with the mundane, when the mundane is just bursting with life. I want to live fully engaged in even those silences and rests, as I want to live fully engaged in the work and play and hardships and joys that God gives me each day.

The Japanese character for ma is 間, which combines the characters for “door” and “sun,” placed so that the light is centered, as if peeking, through the doors. I’m reminded of Holy Saturday in all of this, of the space between the remedy and the triumph, of the long pilgrimage in the same direction. Think of what we have in store for us if, during our exile here on earth, we open our doors a little and let the light of silence and space in. Think of how God might work in us and through us if we listened to what He says in the silences.

We grow in these spaces. So why do we spend so much of our time fleeing them and numbing ourselves? Why do we try to fill them with artifice and entertainment?

Regrettably, I’m aware of the recent trend of AI-generated Ghibli-style memes going on somewhere on the internet.1 After spending only a short time enjoying Hayao’s films, I’m not sure I can think of anything more tasteless and lazy. But I also can’t think of anything that more clearly represents the spirit of the age: reducing that which is beautiful, intentional, and meaningful to a “filter” by means of total artifice, then using it to showcase our own idiocies for entertainment. It puts me in mind of the Scripture that says of idols that those who make such gods will become like them. Or, put another way: stupid begets stupid.

Hayao tried integrating computer animation into Studio Ghibli’s work-flow at one point, thinking that it would help automate some of the “tiresome, tedious work of drawing that we didn't want to do.” But then he found that down the line it actually hampered their standard of quality, making what was marginally tiresome even more so. It also fostered rigidity in their process, instead of fostering imagination.

“The computer can draw with a certain exactitude, and then we think that the animators must hand-draw exactly as the computer does. So the computer methodology enters our brains... I wanted to take that computer out of our brains and just be able to draw what we see with our own eyes, so I disbanded the computer graphics section.”

I don't know if Hayao has seen any of this recent AI slop, but I can imagine what his response might be pretty clearly. Because eight years ago, a group of programmers presented their work on early AI animation to him, and this is what happened:

As sobering as this is, let’s be honest, it’s also hilarious. You can see the programmer’s souls leave their bodies in real time.

The primary questions Hayao and his producer have are the ones they’ve spent their lives asking: What is our purpose here? How do we communicate the complex emotions of being human to one another? The answers these programmers offer — and that AI acolytes give to this day — are not just unsatisfactory, they’re damning.

Whether someone likes Spirited Away or not is actually not the issue at stake here. Disagree with its worldview all you will. Dislike its characters. Cringe at the consequences of No-Face’s gluttonous rampage. Squint in confusion. But you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that a human made this, with care and intention, for fellow humans. The weirdness and beauty in that movie are a uniquely human perspective on the world, rooted in a real culture and tradition, relatively untouched by the ravages of our internet age.

As he mentioned in the video above, it’s not that there’s no pain or evil or ugliness on the screen. It’s that when there is, it must be a true representation that honors the humanity behind it. An artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated, can never, full stop, do this.

My family is gracious, so they gave me and Studio Ghibli another chance with My Neighbor Totoro. This one was a hit, with its keenly childlike view of the world and adorable characters. Of course, it showcases the meticulous, living animation which was as ground-breaking and beautiful then (1988) as everything Ghibli has created. I’m looking forward to showing them the cozy side of Ghibli with Kiki’s Delivery Service and the adventurous side with Castle in the Sky. After those, just maybe, they'll give me a chance to go a little weird again with Howl’s Moving Castle.

But these stories aren’t the point. What I really wish for my kids — and for all of you — is space, silence, more than a little boredom, and the sense that if your life doesn't look like a traditional hero’s journey, you still have immense value in the sight of God. We don’t need Hayao’s films to help us see that, but they certainly act as an antidote to the crammed, shallow nature of our modern-day lives.

Meanwhile, the kids daily check the frog pond for signs of life. For now it’s just a space for life to fill. I’ve found in my research on frog ponds that it’s not a good idea to introduce frogs we catch elsewhere, due to sensitivity of both frog and pond to fluctuations in their ecosystem. So we wait while the pond sits silent — as we do in our garden, as we do in our days — trusting that in time, something beautiful and slimy and alive will make its home within it.

Thus, we play the rests.

March Favorites:

Here’s a helpful explanation mapping out kishōtenketsu in Spirited Away, in contrast to the “hero’s journey” storyline in Star Wars.
I really loved this exploration of Hayao Miyazaki as a creator and person. He was a complicated guy.
Very excited about Jon Guerra’s new album, Jesus, coming out today.
Vulfpeck’s live-recorded Clarity of Cal album is pure joy. We’ve watched it multiple times.
We watched the exceptional movie The Wild Robot on recommendation of my exceptional niece. It was hilarious and beautiful, and come to find out — it takes inspiration from Hayao’s work.
Just finished Richard Adam’s Watership Down. I read this excellent novel about rabbits back when I was a teenager. This second reading revealed all that I loved then (the adventure of it from a rabbit’s-eye view) while enhancing it with new things to love (the heart of a community run on mutual respect and grace, and the humble leadership of Hazel).