I took this photo a year ago in June along my little trail in the middle of a rainstorm that felt as if it were created by the clouds in my own heart.
This article explores the concept of the rhizome, introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus,’ as a metaphor for interconnected systems. It delves into how the rhizomatic perspective challenges hierarchical thinking, offering a framework for understanding the complexities of life, multispecies relationships, and the COVID-19 pandemic. By examining the intricate web of connections between humans, technology, nature, and society, the article reveals the implications of the rhizome for understanding interconnectedness and resilience in the modern world
I want to bring you to touch soft moss, and witness mysterious lichen as they whisper secrets of survival and resilience to pine and stone. I want them to cast their spells of belonging onto your body and into your mind. To enchant you with their knowing. To let you see their being. (Estimated read time: 1 minute)
I question, then, if landscapes might hold imprints of memory, like repositories of the encounters that have occurred within them, and while we can dance around this understanding academically, we may not be able to address it with the rigor demanded of Western science.
It might be helpful to remember to breathe–that this too is life. It is sketching lines, and erasing lines and building a map of the forest floor of your work that is much more than regurgitated information consumed in haste, and is instead an embodied and relational process full of growth, decay, and regeneration.
The way loss is a mythic eclipse. The way its existence darkens our sun. Grief is existentially terrifying, it consumes like fire, leaves us without breath. It is isolating, disorienting, like a liminal and endless purgatory one must traverse to leave the depths of hell. Only none of the exits are marked. It is an isolating and yet universal fall to the knees.
