(Fig)ures of Speech, (Fig)uring it Out
Figs, tracking, growing, and prompts for now and then
I want to tell you about the delight I feel discovering a fig tree: exuberant, effervescent, expanding, arriving as a shout, often, eyes wide, walking after into the middle of the night, dusk, a sidewalk, summer and spring and all seasons, in the middle of a crowded street, tracking these trees all months for signs of change. Imagine the exuberance, then, months later, in finding the fruit.
These moments with the figs and finding them on foot are small delights, and strengthening in body and mind, grounding in an environment where often I am seeking a reminder of life growing, shifting, changing, here in the city — a foraging for connection and meaning.
I’ve been tracking the fig trees. I keep a list in my body and mind of where and how they’re growing, keeping list in the glow of my phone in the Notes section, and visit them when I can. Visiting the figs is the task I turn to to be in the world outside of the work day. Growing in parks, through fences, in pots, on sidewalks, green fruits budding and transforming skin to purple, deepening, birds enjoying their ripening, too. I find them in August, at lunch time, on a Wednesday, after a meeting, September, October, in middle of the day, after a coffee, in the darkness of evening.
I am energized and astonished by the abundance of these figs, focusing on remembering where they grow, tuning in to how and when, and learning. I watch the figs and think about language and life figuratively, using nature as a lens, a guide, and an anchor. Writing can help us map our way through life — help us ground, recenter, and orient, to remember this is who I am, this is where I’ve come from, what I’m letting go of, where I’m aiming towards, and who or where I’ve been. It gives us a practice, individually and collectively, to orient towards, navigate towards, and organize around. It can give us a way to track, tend to, and be in tandem and find connection with the ways of our own growing.
The nature of practice and repetition is one that often unfolds incrementally, grows slowly without us noticing. Walking and writing show the slowness — the noticing, the getting to know place and time, the seasons and how they change, how plants grow or don’t. In an age of immediacy, the more that we can tune into the details, the deeper we can be in the presence of that savoring. Like circling the block, we might revisit storylines or spirals in our own psyches that wind their ways through our lives until something unravels within them and moves through. Writing is a way of moving the story: revisiting, tending, and remembering. It’s stitch, a bridge, and a way to map through our personal and shared stories from the past, the present, and imagine our ways into the future.
The lenses we use to write through, or the stories we carry with us, can open us up or close us off to how we sense and understand the world (and ourselves and each other) throughout time based on our scopes of focus. What we find beautiful, challenging, or delighting are largely based on how we choose to focus our attention. I noticed the fig tree in Odette’s yard only after my grandparents died. Until then, I’d never looked to the yard, or cared about the fig tree. But grief dialed in the noticing, made the lens finely tuned and acute. I remember that day, that summer, those years ago, how I walked outside and traced paces along the lines of their back fence along the lines of their home. I hadn’t noticed fig tree before that and after I started to notice them everywhere.
This fixation on figs is less about consuming the fruit, less about accumulating and foraging, and more about mapping and embodying curiosity — less about harvesting and more about tending to the moments, learning, and noting, learning the fruit and the trees and the streets and process and the seasons as they shift and morph and change. Learning the fruit, the plant, what it needs, the shifting color fields of its skin, and paying attention to the rhythmic way in which it grows, savoring the sweet delight of the fruit when it does arrive, and understanding.
Writing and walking are practices to slow down and learn the world and its rhythms: how things change fast and slow, exponentially and incrementally. Like repeating the same circles and shapes in walking around the city and noticing the ways in which the figs grow, transmute, and change throughout the seasons, I pay attention to my own internal world, tracking internal experiences and how they change. Like the figs, I tune into where and how the growing takes form — personally, relationally, collectively — and when I remember, celebrating it along the way. Growing and expanding are not always guaranteed, they are gifts in this life, and are moments to be savored and celebrated.
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Often, I’m asked how we can use prompts in writing to focus a journaling practice. Writing can also be a way of prompting ourselves to map, locate, and navigate where we are, how we have been, and where we are going. It can be a way of regulating, reflecting, grounding down, and imagining, so as to resource ourselves and revive, be with, and continue. Coming back to the practice of writing, like walking, is a way of learning to be with life as it is, as it’s unfolding, returning agency to our actions in the process. Writing can be a stitch and and amplifier for our lives ancestrally, internally, personally, and collectively — a way of conversing with and within the world.
Writing for the past can give us a framework by which to reflect and learn and scour for insights and notice our own growing. Writing in the present grounds us into now, into what’s in existence, what we are noticing and sensing. Writing tuned in to the future gives us space to play with fantasy, imagination, imagery, and to imagine new worlds: their symbols, what they feel like, and what it might take to arrive to these new places and ways of being, how we can embody them now, or are already embodying them currently.
Like fig skin, time in life is delicate, sweet, savoring, existing in a brief moment that is fleeting. When I remember, I look to the figs often. I notice how the starling guards the fruit, too, and feel the ways the bird’s life and mine are connected.
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As you write, try this:
Play with: reflection, presence, and imagining futures — reflect on the past, what’s present, and what you’re imagining.
Play with: the personal, relational, collective, imagining your reflections are concentric circles, topographic lines, growth lines on a tree expanding outward. What do you notice or imagine for you, yours, and the whole of humanity?
Lately, I’ve been using my journaling pages to acknowledge, and then to remain accountable. What am I noticing or feeling? What am I avoiding? What do I need to do in order to continue?
Or, I play with the push and pull of directness and metaphor, the lens of the figurative nature of language, approaching things both directly and figuratively:
What’s a challenge you’re facing right now? What would the ideal solution be?
or
What’s a knot I’m feeling, sensing, or experiencing? How can I relax and unravel? What tools can help untangle? What are we composting? What are we growing? Like a ripe fig, what’s sweet and delicate?
nourished by, tuning in:
Reading and re-reading “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde, keeping it out and open and revisiting it. Words and teachers as fuel to stay focused and call representatives (here). Moving and dancing to this playlist I put together for autumn. Savoring The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Bookshop) and grateful for the ripe sweetness of time and space with friends.
experiences:
October 26 | Build Your Journaling Practice irl
November 4 | Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch + French Link Stitch irl
November 7 | Taste & Write: Meditating on the Senses irl
November 11 + 12 | Renegade Craft Fair irl
November 18 | Creative Nature: Earth Inspired Journaling irl
November 19 | Build Your Journaling Practice irl
November 21 | Paper Marbling irl
