Climbing trees

I had watched my brother from afar, clambering up the tree.

However hard I tried, I was simply not big enough to reach...

to reach up far enough, to pull myself up...to be big.

I rather had the impression that I was fated always to look on from below and admire.

Growing up is never fast enough when you are five years old and tree-challenged.

My brother took pity on me, or got bored with tree climbing and gave me a foot up.

That first foot up was all that it took to get me upwardly mobile and free.

Once the hidden hold had been pointed out, there was no stopping me.

The tree became my escape, my playground, my kingdom, my best friend.

Every day, on getting up and finishing breakfast, I would head out and up towards a future adventure.

The tree was an adaptable play partner.

I was a pirate in the rigging, Tarzan, lord of the jungle, a secret agent, a mountaineer...

On Sundays, I would hide and scare the ladies dressed up to the nines for the communion service.

On other days, I would practice walking out as far as I could on the higher branches to see how far they would bend down so that I could jump to the ground and scare my mother.

On one special day, I found that I could climb over a wall into a secret hiding place, protected by dense undergrowth and dangerous nettles and brambles. This would become my headquarters for planning operations.

It may not have spoken much, but I didn't let its mutism prevent me speaking for it as I included it in daily conversation.

I confided to the tree that it was a very special friend.

It was a good listener.

That tree lived on in my memory long after I had grown up and moved on.

Forty years later, I took my kids to see the house where it had been.

I was desperate to show them that tree.

We arrived, it had gone.

They probably wouldn't have understood its importance anyway.

Tangled routes

A series of hashtags tell the stories of my online connections over the past ten years, tangled routes indeed:

#rhizo14, #clmooc,#digiwrimo, #blimage…

If the tree, my childhood friend has long gone, over the years my relationships have grown rhizomatically across the internet. The image featured above, entitled “Tangled roots” (2019), was inspired by a photo taken by Hawaï based artist, speaker, and creativity mentor Amy Burvall who has played an important role in a number of collaborative mixed media projects that I have worked on over the years.

Another friend, connected educator-poet-musician, Kevin Hodgson, commenting my childhood tree story, writes:

“We need those trees to step up and get a wider view of things.

We need our personal vantage points, our refuges from the mass of traffic.

We need time to dream, to tinker, to establish relationships with objects, trees, and people.”

In a sense, both my visual and written art, the time I take during walks in city streets or in the countryside, to pause, to observe and contemplate, to sketch or to take photos, enable me to get a wider view of things.

Art, has always been a refuge and a vantage point, a means to build deep relationships between myself and my environment.

My ever evolving affinity groups of creative friends, like the tree of my childhood, offer me social and emotional support enable me to get away from the mass of traffic online and offline and to explore new unexplored lands.

I am thankful to the tangle of tree and human roots, they nourish and support me.

They keep me grounded.

“It is in the roots, not the branches, that a tree’s greatest strength lies.”

Matshona Dhliwayo