A tree can only hold so much before it stops meaning anything. I found this out by building the wrong version first.
The early Kodama grew one tree forever. Every word you ever wrote fed the same trunk, and after a few months it was a magnificent, unreadable mess — a green cloud you couldn't find yesterday in, let alone last February. It looked like progress. It felt like noise.
So the tree became a month. You write your words through August and they grow one tree; on the first of September that tree finishes, and a new seed goes in the ground. The one you finished doesn't vanish. It moves to the Grove.
The Grove is the quiet room of the app. Your past months, each as its own small tree, lined up as cards you can tap back into. March, the one with the sparse start and the sudden run of bright words near the end. June, mostly warm, one hard week you can see in the branches without reading a single entry. You don't get a chart of your year. You get twelve trees, and you already know what each one means, because you grew it.
There's something a monthly reset does that I didn't plan and now think is the whole point. A bad month ends. Not metaphorically — actually, on a date. The tree that came out of a heavy February is a real object you can look at, be a little tender toward, and then leave in the Grove while March starts clean. No streak carries the weight forward. You are not one continuous score being kept. You're a person who has twelve different months in you every year, and some of them are hard, and they each get their own tree and their own ending.
I look at my Grove more than I expected to. Not to measure anything — there's nothing to measure, it's just trees. More the way you'd flip back through a shelf of thin notebooks you actually filled. That one was a strange month. That one I'd forgotten. This one I'd like to have again.
Twelve trees a year. Small enough to read. Honest enough to keep.
Kodama is a one-word journal for iPhone — US$7.99 once, no subscription, no account, no ads. Your words never leave your phone. Get it on the App Store.