Heartwood, center
Walking, writing, trees, and internal turning
The image is this: a circle, surrounded by larger circles, concentric, and radiating out. Think: growth rings on a tree, the topographies of your fingerprints, layers of the earth, or the half sphere of a cut onion. These circles can expand outward, or be peeled back, to reveal the core, and the center.
I arrived to the morning by walking and writing. I am learning a new place, tracing body like a line along the city, cement, sidewalk, to the shoreline, to the places where the sand and the harbor and the hum of the water and the lingering trees meet the buildings. This walking practice is an inhale, an effort to notice capacity of the physicality of place and my own experience within it, and returning home is the exhale. Both are part of life; both are needed.
I walked along the water and unpacked curiosity, looking through it like a lens. I watched the flow, the steady and moving water, saw a swan float by on the waves of the harbor. I wanted to take a cross section of this moment of place and time and expand it; I wondered what stories exist here, wondering what the pines would say, the rocks on the shoreline, the people, the buildings, and how long they’ve been here. How deep the roots go, what nourishes them, and what helps them grow and expand out away from the familiar places of the comfort in center. What would the water say, constantly transient, and the shorelines, what stories would they share about how they have changed? What has stayed the same? Walking along the water, my mind softened, and body followed, peeling away layers of noise.
The cross section of a tree reveals its layers, its stories, the impacts of environment and nutrients, drought years, ripe years, times of survival and no growth and expansion and growing — these stories exist within the trees told silently. At the center of each tree is the heartwood, that hard and dense part of the wood, containing that which has died and transformed it into a substance that is stronger, more resilient, and resistant to decay. It has collaborated for years with the conversation between gentle soil and stable center. It has conversed between life and the dying. From the center, the tree grows, radiating outward, upward towards the sky, and outward, like the core of an onion, like a fingerprint, like a pebble hitting a lake and radiating out.
I think about heartwood this morning as I’m grounding down into body and mind and tune into that presence, that center. How the purpose of these practices — like walking and writing — are not to stay solo and siloed in the comforts of our own spaces, but ways to connect to life as its being lived, through our lived experiences with each other. We write and we walk and we meditate and touch into that center in order to expand out and be in the world. We take our life and our stories and our growth and decay and we transform it. The purpose of finding this mythological place of center is not to stay there, but to develop the capacity to go to the edges of experience and bounce back, like the deep inhale into the lungs, like the exhale being released.
After the morning’s walk, I arrive back to the space where I’m living and I listen. I write down the reflections from the walk, hear the hiss of the heater, hum of the train, the refrigerator, the traffic, and later, feel the rhythm of the streets like a lingering resonance in my body, the rhythm of feet on the streets as a way of arriving. I stretch arms and legs across the floor and craft isometric shapes in collaboration with gravity. I notice the places where this physicality is resistance to change, and where it is painful, and I do not push past. I wonder what these floors would say, how long ago this wood was connected to the earth and not a second floor walk up, I wonder what stories they told as trees before they were uprooted, what stories they tell now in this new place. I visit the edge of the city and return, visit the edges of capacity and exhale. I notice this growth, this edge, and keep going.
On the floor of the room where I am writing this, the wood is worn and warm from use, sloped from years of feet and furniture across it living and pacing, as if the room has exhaled slowly into a place that feels comfortable and familiar. Across the floor are at once the growth lines of the wood grain, irregular and measured like a wave, met abruptly with the carefully measured edges of the planks of wood, evidence of a time when the wood ceased to be a tree, to where nature was forced into a unified plank with clean lines instead.
As I stretch, I think about writing on blank pages and lined pages. How lined pages give us space to be perfect, while blank pages give us space to be with ourselves in all of our forms, and expand.
What happens when we emerge out of our circles of comfort? Courage, strength, and resilience take form. In life we are constantly brought to our edges and our centers, and life breathes in a way that necessitates it so. Comfort is easy; to stay in our familiar forms takes courage. So whenever we are pulled too far out, let’s think of this: what’s something you value and care about, and feel rooted into, and how can that be a guide, a place to return to? What do you want to grow towards? What do you reveal there in your own depths, core, and center?
If colder weather keeps you inside more, and you find you’re craving nature, come to this weekend’s writing workshop in Astoria, where we’ll look to the language of landscape to inspire prompts for reflection.
nourished by:
A quick soup: onions, garlic, mushrooms, cumin, sautéed and then simmered in broth
upcoming experiences:
November 18 | Creative Nature: Earth Inspired Journaling astoria
November 19 | Build Your Journaling Practice brooklyn
November 21 | Paper Marbling brooklyn
November 30 | Paper Marbling baltimore
December 6 | Marbled Stationery brooklyn
December 11 | Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch brooklyn
