Out of the Trees, Into the Forest

The past two weeks have been exhausting, but in a good way. I'm finally feeling back on my feet again, figuratively speaking, though it's again more of a pause before the onrush. (Heck, it's not even much of a pause - I'm uploading gingnormous amounts of photos at this very moment, a hugely tedious process.)

While I was at the conference last week (as opposed to the workshop the week before), I finally came up with a way of quickly describing my academic history that satisfied me. Before I'd been using the metaphor of the merry-go-round, as in "I've fallen off the academic". Now, I say that I've "fallen from the tree."

I like this new metaphor because it's much richer, and it seems to do a better job of describing the experience. As I can now think of it, when I was a squirrel in the academic tree of History, I was in the habit of clambering out on various branches into other trees - literature, geography, anthropology, various sciences - but my home tree, the one in which I nested, was History.

Now, having fallen out of that tree, I'm free to explore the forest.

Last week's conference was an exercise in briefly climbing up into a smaller subspecies of the Literature tree, and while there I confirmed both that I was a History squirrel by training, and no longer comfortable in the branches of academic trees more generally. (Perhaps I need a different animal to be my personal metaphor: something that inhabits some trees preferentially, but which matures into a largely ground-dwelling animal in adulthood.)

While the tree was green and leafy and some of its fruit was sweet, and there were other congenial animals to hang out with in the branches, it didn't feel comfortable. Some of the branches were too far from the ground, some of the animals too serious about defending their territory, and the tree as a whole felt a bit stunted, as if it were afraid to grow wild and unruly.

The workshop's tree, on the other hand, was a comfortable habitat. Its name, Wildbranch, is taken from one of the streams in the area, but it works in a tree-sense too. (There is, in fact, a local farm that takes Wildbranch as part of its name, and its design features an otherwise ordinary tree with one graceful, curving branch that spirals up around the moon.) I like the wildness of the branches, the way that the tree feels like it could grow and bend in any direction. At the same time I like the number of cozy nooks, the satisfying nature of the nuts it produces. It's a good place to nest for a bit, to survey the forest from a higher perspective, to hobnob with similar creatures as myself.

I have become a creature of the forest, uneasy in many trees, but able to roam among and explore them as a community, as competition, as possible habitats, some comfortable, others less so. After a long struggle, I have learned to love the view from the ground.

Comments

[Lorianne]

Myself, I've always been a bit out of my tree... :-)

[Rana]

*laughs*