Art Supplies

I draw trees and mountains

I bring you a series of tiny gifts this week. If they were packets of seeds, these words would be trying to turn into fragile sprouts. They need just the right conditions to thrive.

My brain is overly wintered and these snapshots started as a way of giving myself permission to not form a lengthy, extended thought — a vacation from my usual long-form essays as we near the anniversary of a year of me posting weekly words for you to read here on Substack. I kept my notebook near me this week and figured that I would collect impressions of things, a few paragraphs of images I saw or thought about or dreamed.

But like most writing (and life), my intentions led the way to something else entirely.

What I bring you this week is a series of prose poems.

Poems and I go way back. Poems paid my way through college and gave me a canvas to paint on when I — despite all my better efforts — couldn’t varnish the shape of my feelings with a brush. I studied visual art because I’m a sucker for symbols and metaphors. Poems, to me, are tiny paintings made into words. You see them in your head and they echo with a resonance that pulses through your chest.

When given a literal blank page to draw on, I sketch trees, mountains, and vines. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid and the simplicity of these doodles hasn’t changed much over time. Christopher is the visual artist in our house — that’s how I introduce him as if we only get one title for artistic license and aren’t allowed to tinker with ALL THE THINGS.

Somewhere along the way, I created a rule in my life that words and images couldn’t mix — like when I inhaled a puff of Flagyl while treating the pony’s feet this past week and had to do a solid google search to see if it was safe to drink a glass of wine.

I have so many rules for myself, some arbitrary, some logical but I’m ready to toss the bylaws I’ve drafted for artistic incorporation out the proverbial, stained glass window.

I crept into the art supply aisle when Christopher and I were out shopping this weekend and I selected a sketch book and pencils and it felt like I was shopping for someone else, like I didn’t belong there, which was all the more reason to drench myself in the glory of it.

Prose poems and flash essays are my writerly equivalent of sketching, a way for me to catch a scene or an image through impressions. They help me condense my thoughts and sink into the richness of details. I’m sharing a few with you this week. They all began as separate thoughts but started weaving together. They’re messy and unpolished, like me — or the me that has my vote if I were given a seat to fill on a committee.

My intentions for this new year are all about re-discovering art and awe. I invite you to see what corner these illusive creatures are napping in your own life and I hope you wake them up gently and share your findings with me. They can be messy and unpolished and incomplete. They can be the incarnation of permission. I’m giving you free rein to do whatever the hell you want.

You can draw crudely and still be sketching. You can write essentially and still be telling stories. You can move your body to music that only you can hear.

Let’s get started.

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

1. || THE RAPTURE

The fallen tree is a trident split from the same source, a trinity of white oak, its bark smooth with pressed ridges — a fingernail on the hand of the earth.

We’d thought about getting married beside this tree but moved the ceremony to the path in the woods where three trails converged into an asymmetry of crossings.

Most of these things come in threes.

The multi-forked white oak was the first tree we noted on the ground when we emerged from the thick sound of the generator to take stock after the storm. I smelled gas and the wet ache of chewed wood and I remembered how my thoughts caught when I was a kid pondering eternity, how I could reach the end of understanding, a flat-earth of knowledge, a line on the map warning: here be dragons.

It took days to saw the length of the triple oak so trucks could pass to the hay sheds. My shoes didn’t make an imprint on the wet sawdust that covered the ground. How could I possibly make a mark in something as large as this storm?

I sit on an overturned log and watch the sky move, blue and limitless, and I remember how scared I was when I was a kid and thought that the rapture would happen and I would be left here alone.

But as I sit on this log and gaze at the overturned roots of this storm-toppled oak I uncover a fear greater than losing my chance at the second coming.

What if I’m not left alone here in these woods and dirt and trees?

What if I’m taken up into the sky?

Without wings can I make my way upward?

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2 || WE FLY

The vultures play in the high wind gusts above the barn as a cold front presses down on the mountains like an oppressive relative.

I keep losing my trail of thought as I announce their presence: look at that big, black bird, there’s another one, that one’s bigger — wait — that’s an airplane.

We’re on the flight path of the airport. On clear days I hear the engines revving for take-off or the windbreak of a landing. As the planes pass over the barn, I announce their presence and wonder where they’re going. I wonder if someone up there is grieving or if someone up there is happy as if I can help them as if I can lessen their losses and laugh at their jokes.

As the vultures glide in the storm front, some alone, some together, the idea of flight stuns me like a newborn thought, a revelation.

We move through the air.

The buzzards seek down. I seek up. And somewhere in the icy currents above the tree tops, our thoughts, occasionally, meet.

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3 || TORPOR

The trees and I have an ongoing conversation, but the winter wind where the vultures swooped rattles the bedroom windows. We gather the dog and move to the center of the house where we can rest with a buffer of attic above us.

And I remember how a decade ago someone called when I was away from the farm to say the big white oak behind the bedroom window was filled with sleeping vultures.

Birds rest in a torpor, their heart rate and breathing slowed, and the grace of the vulture’s flight becomes clumsy when grounded, a plop into gravity shaken off as they hop back on a branch.

The trees support their bumbling as they dream.

And I, a featherless carnivore, rest my heaviness into the blankets as the winter wind crashes through the eaves and the trees keep watch.

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4 || TWELFTH NIGHT

I bought star cards in a museum shop, a heavy deck of perforated cardboard punched in the shapes of the constellations. I could never line them up.

I bought a telescope, a lens to the heavens, so I could watch the night sky close. But like most complex games with rules, I started playing and subsequently gave up.

I bought an app to locate comets on my phone, but I fixated on how the sun was underground, beneath me, and I forgot to look up.

On a blanket where the water met the earth, I lay there with you and didn’t have to journey with my eyes to see the holy weave of the inky, jeweled blanket that mantels our lives.

The stars and the planets and the comets meet us with their frequencies like traveling kings bearing gifts for a story that is written before our eyes.

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Lying our backs staring up at the night sky in Hawaii

The Appalachian Mountains Still Need Your Help

The storm I keep mentioning in today’s segments is Hurricane Helene that ravaged the southeast in September. People in the path of the storm still need your help and you can access my ever-evolving list of private and community initiatives that need your support here:

How to Support Hurricane Helene Recovery: Where to Send Contributions

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Love is the Root

If you’re new to Stable Roots and didn’t come along for the ride of my love story as I posted weekly chapters, you can find all ten starting here:

Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 1

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After this I’ve just been sketching volcanos and cats — and I realize my date is wrong in the corner. It takes me a bit to adjust to a new year.

Next week, Christopher and I drive to Nashville, TN to pick up Gideon, our new farm creative director/muse/vagal nerve balancer (with purrs). Gideon is a Siberian Forest Cat and I’ll probably just be writing about him for the next ten years. Siberians are native to Russia like Maine Coons are native to the US, but Siberians are hypoallergenic. I was hesitant to add a house cat to our crew of hard-working barn cats because I’m terribly allergic to cats (this hasn’t stopped me before).

I’m also allergic to horses, hay, trees, and dogs.

A snowstorm is headed this way and so many of you have already experienced blizzard conditions and wind storms and fire this year — there’s so much happening in the world. I don’t have an answer or an antidote to the madness, but I’m beside you as we bear witness to the whispers and screams of the natural world.

Tell me about the awe you’ve found this week. Tell me about the art you’ve uncovered.

Let’s bear witness to each other’s stories.

Love,
Kim