"From coping to coppicing..."

A prompt & new music for you.

It’s the middle of the night and I wake up from a deep sleep to realize that I am both hearing and seeing words in my mind’s eye:

“FROM COPING TO COPPICING”

I’m like, wait, what?

“FROM COPING TO COPPICING”

It was like waking up into the dying echo from a weird a.m. radio station. Or like I had passed the magazine rack on my way through the checkout lane of Dreamland but didn’t register this headline until I was halfway to my car.

I mean. It was so random and confusing but clear it made me laugh. It wasn’t until the next morning in my sketchbook that I started to feel kind of amazed…

Coppicing is not a thing I think about often or have ever done, but is both a word and a practice I’ve always thought was beautiful.

Notebooking about it, the implications were really flying for me: You make one big sacrificial cut from which you can tend a renewable fountain of tools - from firewood to broom handles. And I thought, whoa, you can grow your own axe handle, too.

---

So— I should back up and mention that in the weeks prior this dream-message I was doing a bunch of notebook work about feeling “cut off”. But working with a totally different and specific botanical metaphor.

For the last three years I’ve worked intensively with the image of the iris blossom. The iris also came to me in a dream- or I should say several impactful dreams in a row. I’ve rendered them now in watercolor and inks and acrylics and charcoal. I’ve made iris patterns and written iris poetry. And because we live and work in one big room, most of this iris work is surrounding us all of the time.

So, the other week I was staring at my paintings in progress and letting my eyes trace around and around the other artwork on the wall, trying to figure life out - thinking outside my brain - contemplating this collection of flowers without stems and then noticing all the portraits of floating heads and severed torsos…

…and I had one of those big sudden revelatory moments:

Oh my god. I’m all blossom and no bulb. I’m Cut Off.

So, in my waking life I had been really getting some seriously good work done exploring this cut iris metaphor. But I had not been thinking at all about trees…and I definitely had not been contemplating the practice or poetics of coppicing…

Neon was the first to notice the obvious connection. I truly didn’t see it at first.

This was an exceptionally crafty sublimation of symbol from the Dream Maker, I think. Taking me by the shoulders and spinning me from this one “cut off” metaphor I’d been working on & turning me toward a totally different metaphor with a little word play…

…crafty…

By thinking about being cut off through the symbol of the iris blossom, I was thinking about a quick withering, a divorce from life-source, of forcing myself to constantly flower at the expense of tending good soil. (Creatives, you know this feeling.) Identified with the cut flower stem (the floating head) as I was, it took a lot of work to root down and understand that beneath each year’s iris bouquet there must obviously be a life-giving bulb that I was giving no credit to.

But by thinking about being cut off like a tree grown to coppice, it’s a clear picture of purposeful growth connected to a sustaining life force. It’s an easily legible picture of renewal, a tending-to that unfolds over slow-time. I can see it as a combination of intention and sacrifice, a letting-go of being just one thing. Not identified with the axe or the broom handle, but their living origin. And because that big tree stump’s root system is old and wide and strong, I could see how the new shoots are capable of vigorous growth not possible when starting from seed…

That’s the power of symbol.

As I write this now, it occurs to me…

My parents named me so my initials would spell the word E.L.M. (When I left home I cut off the “e.”… who knew I’d been living as a stump for so long?…)

Breaking the 4th wall here: Clearly I had to just pop over to another tab and research everything I could about The Elm Tree— Googling stuff like, “uses for elm”, “elm mythology”, “elm medicine”. This little side-quest has taught me: that elm wood is the kind of tough you make boats and coffins from, that the seeds are called samaras and are edible, that they are “bound up with the underworld”, and that elms are where our dreams live.

A prompt for you this week…

So, I just landed on this perfectly innocuous gardening article, “How to Grow and Care for Elm Trees” and thought: what if this is my care manual? What if I swap my name in for every reference to the elm and this is the poem, “How to Grow and Care for Lisette” instead?

I opened up my notes app and started grabbing lines from the article as I read. This is essentially cut-up poetry - wherein we’re selecting some words to keep & rearranging them outside of their original context.

So, here’s my new care manual:

the legendary Lisette
majestic and resilient
glorious and dignified
a symbol 
of strength and fortitude
even more stunning than before, 
as long as you have the patience to let her grow.

---

Take this idea and run with it today. You maybe weren’t named after a tree, but I think everyone has some plant they feel a particular affinity with. Maybe it’s mugwort or maybe it’s garlic. A giant fig tree in the alley where you used to smoke. Search for some facts or myths about your plant on the interwebs (or a real book?!) and copy interesting lines from the text in the cut-up poetry style, replacing references to the plant with references to yourself. Isn’t it nice to have a grower’s manual?

And music for you, too…

After working through the coppicing thing in my notebook (before I got to go float in a beautiful little Iowa swimmin’ hole) I recorded this improvisation on the dulcimer…

Later, Neon would tell me he thought this music sounded “honey green”: Paid subscribers, below this video you’ll find the full 21 minute trance of a song that I turned this recording into— Honey Green.

Enjoy floating along.

xo,