If you’re just here for the news, this may not be the newsletter issue for you… stick around and I have more newsy letters coming soon!
The last time that I wrote to you, I shared the news that I received a Material Needs Grant from ArtsWorcester to explore roots, expanding and evolving my Mother Three Holds the Stories series to better understand the world beneath our feet, the invisible threads that bind soils and life deep below thesurface, even when paved over…
I invited you to send photos, and send photos you did!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing images of roots with me.
Please continue sending pictures of roots…. this is a long-term project, with a grant award date this Spring and an exhibit date in the Fall of 2025. I have plenty of time to completely geek out about each and every bit of interesting thing that comes my way related to roots.
(Here I am a few years back, completely enchanted by the above ground roots of a ficus tree at South Coast Botanic Garden in Torrance, California. Thanks and shout-out to my mama for taking the picture!)
Here are a few…
i: The touch, the volume, the space. I’m super tactile, enjoy tools and texture, and love working with my hands. I want to explore what it is to play with volume, experimenting with communicating a sensation that not relegated to two dimensions or a wall.
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ii: Roots feel like magic to me. The entire underground realm does. I can see the horizon, the sky, the water. But I cannot see the entire world beneath my feet.
I sometimes wish I could shrink down to the size of an ant, to crawl under the surface and explore tunnels and find stones and pockets of air. I wish I could see the colors that exist below the surface, sense the depth of light and shadow, know the fungi and the creature and the roots and how they travel, tune into the silence or the sound of soil.
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iii: In creating roots, I get to carry out a fantasy of what it would be to travel beneath the surface… in ways that are not destructive. Most of the below-grade views that I have seen occur when a giant hole is dug into the ground to make room for construction. I don’t want the view of the giant hole. I want to imagine and understand the view of earth from within healthy, thriving soil, as uninterrupted by pavement as can be.
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iv: Since buying a home in 2022, I’ve been able to plant and steward land in ways that I was never able to before, and that feels like a shift. I am still sensing what it is to sink into land, to get to know soil, to understand therelationships between flora and fauna that existed before I was here and will, with any luck and attentive work, exist after I am gone.
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v: Also since buying a home, I don’t have a sense that I had before of being on the move, needing to prepare for what’s next, wondering where I’d go.
For more than two decades, I had been floating in a way, uprooted, a true Cancer crab with home on my back (even though we rented one place for 8+ years, my relationship to place always felt transient).
I think the rings were (and still are) a way to acknowledge stories of time stored within a physical body. The roots are a way to acknowledge and interrogate relationship with place.
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vi: It feels imperative to me that all who wish to tend to and care for land must have the chance to do so. And all those who wish only to expoit and extract from the land must not have the chance to do so. …I find… Who wants land and does not revere and respect the interconnectedness of roots does not revere and respect generations, air, or soil.
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vii: Within the walls of this house, I still sense a slow softening of my own body’s boundaries and borders. There are still many boxes left to unpack, even two years later. I think that is a part of me hanging on to the tightness and compactness of before. As I look to roots, I sense safety to open and clear the boxes.
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viii: Living here, across the country from where I grew up and where my family lives, my husband across an ocean from where he grew up and where his family lives, I’m very aware of family roots.
Sometimes my left shoulder aches, feeling so far from the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes my right shoulder is claustrophobic, too close to the Atlantic. It’s strange to me how my body feels that sensation.
What do my human roots of relationship to people and land have to say about grief and distance? What is it to root deeply, to feel at home, and still to carry a sense of being away?
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ix: And then there are the facts of roots. I feel like we as humans today understand rings and bark and trunk and branches better than roots. So much remains either unknown or untaught. When I look up “what do roots look for when they grow?” answers come up around water, nutrients, stability, but…
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x: …But I know that roots are not *only* looking for water, nutrients, stability. They are also looking for community.
Not all. Some appear to be territorial, gathering every nutrient and drop of water in the vicinity, crowding out other plant life. But so many roots are reaching out, feeling for symbiotic relationship with other roots and with mychorryzal beings.
(Even those that do crowd out plant life welcome and seek out animal companionship, so if I expand my definition of looking for community from fellow flora to fauna, I find still a searching for community.)
Why don’t we recognize this more often? If we understand community as an essential root need and purpose, how does it change the landscape in which we live: within the domestic and cultural spheres alike?
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xi: Just in recognizing this seeking out community, it changes the way I want to plant.
(Beyond companion planting, which I practice with my vegetables.)
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xii: The witch hazel I planted last year, a tree that is supposed to grow about a foot a year, has already grown more than three feet this Spring.
I know in my heart of hearts that it is not only its access to sun and water, but also because it was planted along the edge of the woods. I know that over the Winter, it reached out to say hello, and received a welcome.
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xiii: Now that I am working with the concept of roots, seeing homes with singular trees on large lots makes me sad. I sense a loneliness and sorrow in them, and hope their roots travel far enough to find a friend.
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xiv: I wonder if art can change the artist. I wonder if art can change who sees the art. I wonder if art can change the world.
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xv: If it can… if art can change the conversation… if it can open us up to possibility and emotion… can sculptures of roots inspire action? Can it move a person to plant a tree, now, in this second-best time to plant a tree, per theChinese proverb? Can it move a collective to think holistically about thespaces we tend to? Can making art about roots empower my voice to speak out against deforestation, especially when I see it locally? Can art fundamentally change our perspective and open up a sense of wonder to ask… what else is sentient? And why do I feel, deep in my body, that it matters? That I care?
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Finally, before I go…
I wanted to share with you some photos of non-tree roots I’ve been paying attention to, in this process, and also some photos of the garden.
I’ll put more on my website soon (online edit: indeed, there are more images here than I sent initially to newsletter subscribers)… the files are large and honestly… I can’t be bothered right now to size them down, so here is a sample of six images: parsley roots from last year’s herb garden (look how tightly they held a ball of soil!), and a few pictures of the earliest colors these past few weeks, waking us up from monochromatic Winter here in Central Massachusetts.
Next issue of {news and the muse}, I am super excited to share some fun newsy content with you. In the meantime… thank you for reading. Really and truly.
| with so much love, |
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Pssst….
This email had a bunch of PS notes… here they are, if you’re curious. (There usually aren’t this many, but… I guess I had a lot of extra stuff to add!)
PS: I love it when you hit reply and share with me a recent moment of creative making… that energy is so potent, and it is an honor to celebrate and amplify it through the act of witnessing.
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PPS: I’ve noticed more and more people recently saying “I hope you are well” when we connect.
My response is essentially this: in my immediate surrounding, inside my home and outside my window, all is truly well.
And also… I wrestle (a lot) with the pain and sorrow and unwell that exists beyond this immediate, intimate space that I inhabit. I write to representatives, I read Palestinian literature and listen to Palestinian songs, I listen to, follow, and engage with Jewish voices leading movements for ceasefire, sovereignty and justice, and some days no matter what I think to do, it all feels so small and inadequate.
We are all connected, we living beings. Where there is pain in the world… in Palestine, in the Congo, on the streets of Worcester just down the road from me now… there is pain in our person.
If the world is witnessed and there is no pain, has the world been witnessed? Have I engaged with my fullest being?
And yet, and also… if the world is witnessed and there is no delight, has the world been witnessed? Have I engaged with my fullest being?
It feels like a utopia to imagine a world where there is no sorrow, no pain. But I think it is better to attempt to imagine and picture a world where there is sorrow, and there is pain, but there is no more cruelty. For sorrow and pain stand with an open heart. To love is to one day grieve. To grieve is to one day have loved.
I came back to the page below in my Journal for Justice earlier this week, and it helped re-orient me. I seek to find joy and delight in my immediate surroundings, so that I can remain here, so that I can tune into life, so that I can see they beauty, and so that from that center, I can invest my time and attention and love and resources toward a more joyful world.
As the Black poet and Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte wrote: “Joy is an act of resistance.”
Joy brings me back to “What can I do?”
Finally as others have said to me… this multilayered acknowledgment of existence… I say to you: “I hope you are well.”
Once again, for real signing off… with love.
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(PPPS: If you have a friend who loves longer form content and conversations about art and creativity and activism and nature, please do share this newsletter with them. Thank you!)
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