About

Heyy I’m Jiri, the Transdimensional Tree Elf!

Welcome to Kodamap, make yourself at home~! I’m Jiri, which I suppose isn’t too relevant to you, but me being the creator of this cute little web-app and all, I thought I might as well give you an idea about what kind of person made this ♥

These days I am first and foremost a person walking a spiritual path, and also a path of finding ways to express myself and give myself to the world in all my Jiri-ness ☺️ I want to make everyone I come into contact with that child-like fun and weirdness and existential bliss many of us think they have lost somewhere along the way!

This entails many creative outlets like piano improvisations in the dark, flowing DJ mixes of all kinds of different sounds, strange expressive dance, drawing/doodling, writing…
And under the name Projekt Kinoko I guide people through meaningful psychedelic journeys ✨️🍄✨️

KODAMAP is another one of those things that surfaced and wanted to exist!

It’s made by me as a passion project, and it is not trying to become anything ♥

I am in trees a lot

As the Tree Elf I am, a lot of my days I find myself in the Woods! Just walking around connected to the trees and the animals and the elements… Having a nap… And climbing a tree or two, or three, or more! Really taking my time, sitting up there, chillin’ with the insects up there, sometimes even taking my backpack up there and enjoying a little Treetop Picknick, enjoying the view… And then Oops, I didn’t notice it’s already getting dark!

Climbing trees means something to me that I can’t quite express in words. I feel connected to… something. Something inside myself, something about this world. Just the most pure version of me, without all the worldly clutter, and the tree being itself. My body doing its oldest and most primal thing. There’s no audience up there and nothing to get right. Your hands find bark, your feet find weight, and that’s suddenly all that ever mattered…

In Japan I met many ancient trees that are worshipped for this ‘something’ they possess, and I certainly felt why they are. It’s quite something to be standing in front of something that was already big before anybody alive was born (some have lived for literal thousands for years!), and there isn’t much to say about it.

Being in a tree turns me into a tree elf, and being a tree elf makes me go into trees! 😁 For real though. A couple years ago I couldn’t have imagined how significant this ‘hobby’ would become in my spiritual life. It shows me the ‘real’ thing that Jiri is, provides one of the most direct ways to access the things the Earth has to teach us.

…The Tree doesn’t ask you to believe anything. You just go up ♥

Allies

What I actually want, underneath the map and the difficulty ratings and all of it, is small: a network of lovely trees, built with love, together with whoever else feels this the way I do.

Allies, is the word I keep landing on. People who also feel that climbing a tree is something truly special. If that’s you, you’re already part of this.

Why a map

Every tree marked as a Climbing tree is one somebody got up with their hands and their feet.

Because a good tree is hard to find and easy to walk past, and because somebody once showed me one and it changed my week. That’s still the whole idea: somebody finds a tree, somebody else climbs it.

That’s really the whole magic of KODAMAP, and it’s the thing I want to keep sharing: not a finished product, just a slowly growing patch of trees that people actually climbed and actually loved.

P.S. If you don’t know what a Kodama is, get cozy and watch the Ghibli film “Princess Mononoke” ♥