Deeper Roots
2026-09-19
The funny thing about trees is that the more they spread their leaves, the deeper their roots seep.
I came up with that line last night, and I had to do a cliché-check to see if anyone had already said it. There was some African motivational speaker who already said something like that, but with a slightly cleaner aphoristic touch: the taller the tree, the deeper its roots. What's nice about writing creatively is that the actual substance of the text is usually going to consist of the same basic elements. In the same way that there are seven colors in a rainbow, twelve notes in a Western musical scale, what have you—the written word has this too, albeit more abstractly. Whether approaching it from a linguistic perspective (syntax, grammar, scripts) or an ideological one (Campbell's Hero's Journey, Jungian archetypes, etc.), it's still evident that every writer works from a set of constraints like every other artist. The key in refining the process comes in style, voice, and taste; the influences we curate enmesh themselves not into an identity, but simply into a product. The best part is that this product always has a unique value proposition; no one else has my genetic code, experiences, or silly little piccadillies. The most important thing I've learned in this practice isn't to put too much ego into it, even if it's an extended autoethnographic work.
The vessel still cultivates in ways I cannot fully comprehend or understand, but that lack of comprehension brings about a degree of playfulness that can only be found in ignorance—such is the bliss of the creative process. Not knowing where the rabbit hole will take her, Alice plunges further in anyway.
Where to, Lewis?
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