To the Root
Seeds, expanding, and connecting
Sunday started with the sizzle of a squash in the oven, tending to the craving of a body (mine) asking for root vegetables. Squash, olive oil, salt, whole cloves of garlic. Oven, hot, roast for an hour. Feel where the outer layer softens. Check for color, deepening, darkened. I pull the roots from the oven.
Then: I’m watching a seed unfurl. First in the cinema of the mind, and then on a glowing screen. Seed in the soil, the first root traces its line-like tube through the ground, anchoring in. Other roots shoot out, each emerging from seed into ground; and then from that anchored place, the plant uncurls, rises, and expands.
I come to the word root like it’s a taste on the tongue, like it’s a shirt to try on, like it’s an environment to learn and feel and sense into — tasting, sensing, slowing down, feeling it, being with it, learning how it rises, peaks, and passes. I mull root over, researching the etymology and root-origin, picking up root like it’s a rock and turning it over, learning as much of it as I can. Why? Because I want to be specific; I want the precision of context. I want to know more; I want to be anchored in the writing, and the being grounding down, and rooting in.
What I find is this: there’s root as in madder root, bright red, or turmeric and others used in plant dyes. We can be rooted as in our feet, legs, ground, and connection. Rooted as in the force of gravity keeping us tethered to earth’s edge, to floors and walkways, always, holding us in connection to something with its unseen force. Root as in turnips, radishes, potatoes, spicy, starch-laden, nutritive, dormant under the soils for a season and pulled, stored in pantries after they’re pulled from the earth for the steady ways they tend to last throughout colder seasons. Roots as in those extending down into the soil from rose bushes, from kale plants, from mint leaves, from lemon trees, from the olive trees, from sequoia, oak.
Then there’s rootedness, or rooting, as a practice — as in a value, something you’re rooted into and driven towards, like an intention, and then how we are embodying it. Root as in the celebratory ways we cheer in crowds together, arms up and expanding like a plant unfurling, like runners at the marathon over the weekend. I plant the seed of root, and then I notice how it rises from an idea into a practice, from a concept into a lived form, like a stem that stabilities and guides actions.
At crucial creation points — times for decision-making — unrootedness can feel disorienting. In these moments, when I am able, I follow both the feeling and the intention to the root. I’ll sit down and write for a line or a minute, or take the feeling with me on a walk around the block, or I take it with me in a walk around the kitchen, listening to the feeling or the story, noticing where it comes from, where it’s planted or landing in the body, what it rises to, how it grows, shifts, or lands.
I follow from the bloom (the most noticeable part of the expression) down to the stalk (what’s supporting the expression) down to the ground (what’s holding the stalk) into the seed and the ground. Sometimes, there are no answers, and the more I practice, the more I am learning to hold and release the answers and the ambiguity. Going to the root is not a demanding process, whereby we require our lives to give us some kind of concrete answer all the time. Instead, we go to the root to be curious, to learn more, we approach with the intention of curiosity, empathy, and care. Asked another way, in unclear times, I might ask, what’s this grounded in?
Years ago, a woman I worked with shared a drawing activity for grounding down, one I think of often. You start by taking a sheet of paper and draw a line at the bottom — this is the ground. Draw a root system, and populate the roots with your values and what you care about. Around the root, write or draw about the nutrients shared through tubes of the roots in the soil to the stem. Draw a stem to represent that which is supporting the values, whatever is a channel for nutrients to travel through, so that the leaves and flowers can grow, often to the sunlight: who or what’s supporting these ideas, aims, intentions? What’s helping this grow? Then, draw an expressive form: a flower, a fruit, a leaf, whatever it is that comes from the seed. The plant is at once a dance between soil, stem, and leaf — turning inward, grounding down, and expressing out.
It’s this conversational nature that I turn to, and urge towards when met with the inclination to only go in. It’s colder now; these longer days and colder months, we may incline to only turn more inward. To hide away, retreat, and for good reason: inside the longer dark nights, like the dark soil, is a richness, like the rich intricacies of our inner worlds from which to draw from; it’s cozy there.
But plants teach me endlessly about their interconnectivity in the ways that they continue expanding, expressing, and blooming. A metaphor for our own interdependence and connectivity, plants and their roots are the teachers I turn to for inspiration on rooting down, anchoring in, and blooming.
What I learn from the earth is the language of anchoring down, growing, and strength in depending together. A walk in the park shows a scene, briefly, of the work of bees, humming from flower to flower, of the wind moving leaves around, of the sunlight coming up again over buildings and patches of grass, of the flowers blooming, pushing up soft and strong despite the harsh of cement and sidewalks, through artifice and hardness, through fences and metal boundaries. I have no clue when the seeds formed that took hold in those patches of earth or when their roots formed, but I think if we were to see underneath the soil, we’d see how strong their roots are. How intricately and atomically woven together each particle and part of the earth is connected. How these plants are rooted, strong, and anchoring in dance and conversation together.
I swallowed the bitter ideological brew of individuality over everything rooted in capitalism for years. Now, the more I turn to the earth, the more I remember the strength in softness, and the value of rooting into community and connection. I turn to the squash, hot, steaming from the oven, thank it for nourishing me. I feel the bright balm of sunlight and the strong holds of friendship. At once a rooting down, and then an expanding. It is a risk to unfurl, but it is worth it.
What are you rooted into? What people, places, tastes, songs are you anchoring into? What are you rooting for or aiming towards? What roots are nourishing you? Asked another way: what are you nourished by, and what do you care about? How do these values impact the way you expand and take action, and express out in the world? What does it feel like to be rooted or not? How do we practice it as a method for care, a connecting point? How do we celebrate it as a food source in these cooling autumn months? Feel it as an idea, embody it as practice and not just a concept? Play around with it; hold it, notice when it lands. What comes up when you feel into the root?
Someone once told me, “there’s no meeting without eating,” and I agree. Taste + Write: Meditating on the Senses meets tonight in Brooklyn — see you there
nourished by:
Walking and grieving and writing and vocalizing — call representatives, here. Short and longer car rides to this playlist, savoring The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Bookshop). Honeynut squash, wrapped in foil, on 400F for an hour, or until soft and caramelized, then deseeded and blended.
experiences:
November 7 | Taste & Write: Meditating on the Senses brooklyn
November 11 + 12 | Renegade Craft Fair manhattan
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
[here’s the full calendar]