A Tree on the Edge of a Cliff Can Grow Roots

Photo by Guillermo Riquelme on Unsplash

Early in the week, before Election Day, a strange image kept manifesting in my mind’s eye. I kept seeing a little scraggly, tree growing on the edge of a cliff. “This is what it feels like,” I thought to myself. I had an underlying sense of dread, as if poised on the edge of a cliff overlooking an abyss. 

Now, in the days since, I’ve started to find some sort of sustenance in that image. It’s a bit of a miracle, that a tree can live and grow and have a being at the edge of what otherwise looks like an abyss. 

How does something like that happen? Some of these trees are simply able to survive on whatever minerals and water they can pull from the rocks themselves. Others find a way to thrive on the bits of matter, like decay, that find their way into the cracks and crevices in the rock. Either way, these trees find a way to put down roots, to anchor them against the intrepid pull of gravity that calls them into the abyss. 

Roots are part of the underworld. And the underworld might seem unsettling, or even a little inhuman. But the underworld is not an abyss. It’s the belly of the earth, where things decay and then grow. 

An election surfaces information that, prior to the election, had been at least partially subterranean. We stand in the voting booth, we fill in a little bubble, and with that gesture we make some amorphous sentiment pulled from conscious and subconscious registers within us sharable and so, concrete. The bubbles connect, like little drops from a great cloud that turns into power. 

Now, after the election, we can see with more clarity what we suspected was there, underground. It can, I hear tell, look bewildering. For those who spend a lot of time searching around in the underworld of things, there may be equal amounts of dread yet less bewilderment. 

What I can say, though, is that there is more space below ground now. There is a clearing. The underworld can be many things, and sometimes it can be a burrow or a safe space. It can be a space in which to anchor and grow roots. In the times to come it will be important to do what we can to resist the entropic pull of a power that wants to draw us where we are convinced we shouldn’t go. Sometimes that will mean taking action and doing something visible, tangible, concrete. But it also matters very much what’s happening deep within each of us, in the underworlds of our own minds and imaginations. These are the dimensions that are most susceptible to that intrepid force of gravity. We may have to create little burrows to protect something better deep within us, so we can grow something that can live well in the world that’s coming.

Either way, I’m taking some comfort in these figures and images of more than human power: of roots. I can’t quite look at the future right now. It looks like too much of an abyss. But these images—of roots as anchors, of scraggly little figures resisting the force of gravity—are giving me comfort. Maybe they will bring a little to you, too.