Gardens: Green
Jun. 16th, 2021 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkatkinaI've put off Green because it's the most in flux, but it's not going to settle anytime soon. So in the interests of the work of self-cataloguing, I'm going to write down the permutations it's been through.
The previous garden was Yellow, and it as well as links to context, live here.
This'll be a long one. I'm going to split it out in chronological order.
In Green lives the emotional heart.
1. The Impassable Woods
When I first came to Green, the trees were packed so densely, with branches so gnarled and intertwined, that I had to squeeze and crawl like the tightest turns of a caving trip to get through, or go around. The trees were smooth and grey, their shapes reminiscent of arbutus trees but thicker, smoother, and uniform grey. They twined in and around each other in choking closeness.
There was no air movement, no space. It was dim. There was no work to be done because it would permit no work.
2. The Treehouse
Eventually I started looking up rather than forward, and with some focus I convinced some of the branches to open up, to create a short stairway to a structure above. It still took a scramble to get up to the branch-stairs: not hospitable.
The tree house was made of planks, and was rickety but lovingly constructed. It had multiple levels and no roof: it was open to the night sky, and to the air. Room and space to breathe, but cold and exposed.
It was also deeply lonely. This was a place with little couches, conversation nooks, a kitchenette with a stocked fridge, a (glassless) solarium. It was meant to house people. It was a space constructed to invite people in, and no one was there. It was cold most of the time. (Aloia visited once out of sympathy, which is ???? for all kinds of reasons and I'll get to the whats and wtfs of that when/if I ever do Blue. It was strange to have someone there, especially because I felt like she was there out of pity more than because it was a welcoming space. It wasn't. It tried, but it always felt like it was falling apart, and the lack of shelter was a problem.)
3. The Grotto
I worked with the space for a while by visiting and feeling out into it, and after a while the trees relaxed and pulled back to permit walking between them. The ground between these gnarled grey trees was bare and dim and spongy, and there was a knot of trees under the treehouse that had stayed bunched-in and impassable. I didn't think it was only to support the treehouse, so I got curious about what was going on there.
At some point it let me through. A hidden little switch-back between two trees around the back of the copse, and I got into this even dimmer, still, silent space: it was surprisingly empty under these knotted trees, like they stayed in a tight ring around it to hide what was here.
It's interesting because there wasn't really much of anything there. A pool of still dark water took up most of the grotto. More of that grey-brown turf surrounded it, in a little rim leading up to the tree roots.
I tried to encourage a little more space to stand, to little effect. I introduced glowing mushrooms to the trees and turf, to give it a little light while honouring the privacy and darkness of the space. None of it really stuck: a few of the mushrooms, but only enough to see.
4. The Pool
Trying to work with the pool was... complicated.
It wanted to take over the whole space, but I felt I needed space to stand in order to come visit without getting overwhelmed. So I pulled, trying to give a comfortable rim of space between the trees and the pool: it pulled back and took up more space. I tried to build a platform over half of the pool, so I could sit above it and have somewhere to climb onto if I needed to get out of the pool: it only allowed that when the platform fully covered it and I was trapped underneath.
I did get in the pool a few times. I'm mostly certain it connects to the Abzu, which is another imaginary space from my teens/early 20s and is part of K's underground domain. Deep, deep, endlessly deep water in a cave, clear and silent and lit with an odd yellow light that always feels far away.
Anyways, connecting to K's domain usually means it's something that will demand focus and attention and intense work, usually emotional or creative. Considering I do most of these meditations when I'm in bed it's neither private (TL's beside me) nor resourced for creative work (can't even really turn the light on to draw), it hasn't been good timing... and to be honest I don't really get the kind of time on my own that I'd need in order to do the work I feel like it demands. Working 8-9 hour days in a full work week, busted-ass tired on the weekends... and TL and I are always at home together and I really, really don't know how to do this kind of work with an audience. It's kind of a bind, and it's sad because I can feel something down there.
Anyhow.
The pool was hungry, in a way. I felt I could have lain back in it and had it pull me down into the abzu. I never quite let it, and at some point more or less gave up trying to gain ground on it.
It kept expanding.
5. The Swamp
It got so big that it knocked the roots out from under the trees sheltering it, over time, and by then I was standing back and allowing it free rein. It needed to do something, so why not let it?
That did knock down the treehouse. Between one visit and the next, the trees in the original circle had collapsed in on one another. They were still there, balanced by way of being crammed up against one another, but the structure that had supported the house had been so rearranged that the house itself had fallen to bits. I don't really know where those bits have gotten to.
This expansion was dramatic.
It's no longer really a forest: it's a swamp. Water that moves, that rises and falls from time to time. Some hillocks break the surface, but largely the ground is underwater and the trees are half submerged. I think in avoiding going down into the pool, it came up to me, and I don't think this is a bad thing: there are plants growing on the little hillocks, dim little grasses and teeny patches of pondweed for now, but everything feels a little more alive. The air moves gently. It was very static before.
This is pretty new, this change, but I'm noticing it's allowing other effects to display themselves. Last week when I was very excited about something, there were little balls of buzzing blue energy floating like fairy lights here and there in the marsh as I waded through. When that potentiality didn't come through, they went full zappy one night, discharging all of that energy as lightning along with torrential downpour. (It's a remarkably nice little visual metaphor for the way that the excitement/frustration cycle feels in my body -- buzzing potential energy that builds, and then sharp storms that crest with fury if it doesn't come through. I'm curious what it would have been like if the thing had happened and the excitement had become reality.)
I think the swampening correlates to me trying to pop the lid on my emotional health over the past year or so. It's been terrible for the last several years, as well as profoundly deprioritized. It's scary to feel things bubbling up and try to learn to cope with them. These visual metaphors help by giving me an intuitive route into facing how I'm feeling, which I'd become pretty good at downplaying, pushing aside, and generally trying to dismiss.
I'm not sure the house will come back, but all of these gardens thus far have been two-lobed in some manner. Green used to be lobed top (the treehouse) and bottom (the grotto); I'm interested to see if it reprises any of that, or if it tries to provide a structure again. I think the deep hole into the abzu is still there, but with the water everywhere that tunnel is less center stage.
In order to pass through Green these days I have to wade through deep and murky water, as there's no clear path of high ground. That's okay: the water is communication, not threat, and it's never tried to drown me. I do get hella muddy, though, and I think some of this water feeds Orange, a few gardens down.
The previous garden was Yellow, and it as well as links to context, live here.
This'll be a long one. I'm going to split it out in chronological order.
In Green lives the emotional heart.
1. The Impassable Woods
When I first came to Green, the trees were packed so densely, with branches so gnarled and intertwined, that I had to squeeze and crawl like the tightest turns of a caving trip to get through, or go around. The trees were smooth and grey, their shapes reminiscent of arbutus trees but thicker, smoother, and uniform grey. They twined in and around each other in choking closeness.
There was no air movement, no space. It was dim. There was no work to be done because it would permit no work.
2. The Treehouse
Eventually I started looking up rather than forward, and with some focus I convinced some of the branches to open up, to create a short stairway to a structure above. It still took a scramble to get up to the branch-stairs: not hospitable.
The tree house was made of planks, and was rickety but lovingly constructed. It had multiple levels and no roof: it was open to the night sky, and to the air. Room and space to breathe, but cold and exposed.
It was also deeply lonely. This was a place with little couches, conversation nooks, a kitchenette with a stocked fridge, a (glassless) solarium. It was meant to house people. It was a space constructed to invite people in, and no one was there. It was cold most of the time. (Aloia visited once out of sympathy, which is ???? for all kinds of reasons and I'll get to the whats and wtfs of that when/if I ever do Blue. It was strange to have someone there, especially because I felt like she was there out of pity more than because it was a welcoming space. It wasn't. It tried, but it always felt like it was falling apart, and the lack of shelter was a problem.)
3. The Grotto
I worked with the space for a while by visiting and feeling out into it, and after a while the trees relaxed and pulled back to permit walking between them. The ground between these gnarled grey trees was bare and dim and spongy, and there was a knot of trees under the treehouse that had stayed bunched-in and impassable. I didn't think it was only to support the treehouse, so I got curious about what was going on there.
At some point it let me through. A hidden little switch-back between two trees around the back of the copse, and I got into this even dimmer, still, silent space: it was surprisingly empty under these knotted trees, like they stayed in a tight ring around it to hide what was here.
It's interesting because there wasn't really much of anything there. A pool of still dark water took up most of the grotto. More of that grey-brown turf surrounded it, in a little rim leading up to the tree roots.
I tried to encourage a little more space to stand, to little effect. I introduced glowing mushrooms to the trees and turf, to give it a little light while honouring the privacy and darkness of the space. None of it really stuck: a few of the mushrooms, but only enough to see.
4. The Pool
Trying to work with the pool was... complicated.
It wanted to take over the whole space, but I felt I needed space to stand in order to come visit without getting overwhelmed. So I pulled, trying to give a comfortable rim of space between the trees and the pool: it pulled back and took up more space. I tried to build a platform over half of the pool, so I could sit above it and have somewhere to climb onto if I needed to get out of the pool: it only allowed that when the platform fully covered it and I was trapped underneath.
I did get in the pool a few times. I'm mostly certain it connects to the Abzu, which is another imaginary space from my teens/early 20s and is part of K's underground domain. Deep, deep, endlessly deep water in a cave, clear and silent and lit with an odd yellow light that always feels far away.
Anyways, connecting to K's domain usually means it's something that will demand focus and attention and intense work, usually emotional or creative. Considering I do most of these meditations when I'm in bed it's neither private (TL's beside me) nor resourced for creative work (can't even really turn the light on to draw), it hasn't been good timing... and to be honest I don't really get the kind of time on my own that I'd need in order to do the work I feel like it demands. Working 8-9 hour days in a full work week, busted-ass tired on the weekends... and TL and I are always at home together and I really, really don't know how to do this kind of work with an audience. It's kind of a bind, and it's sad because I can feel something down there.
Anyhow.
The pool was hungry, in a way. I felt I could have lain back in it and had it pull me down into the abzu. I never quite let it, and at some point more or less gave up trying to gain ground on it.
It kept expanding.
5. The Swamp
It got so big that it knocked the roots out from under the trees sheltering it, over time, and by then I was standing back and allowing it free rein. It needed to do something, so why not let it?
That did knock down the treehouse. Between one visit and the next, the trees in the original circle had collapsed in on one another. They were still there, balanced by way of being crammed up against one another, but the structure that had supported the house had been so rearranged that the house itself had fallen to bits. I don't really know where those bits have gotten to.
This expansion was dramatic.
It's no longer really a forest: it's a swamp. Water that moves, that rises and falls from time to time. Some hillocks break the surface, but largely the ground is underwater and the trees are half submerged. I think in avoiding going down into the pool, it came up to me, and I don't think this is a bad thing: there are plants growing on the little hillocks, dim little grasses and teeny patches of pondweed for now, but everything feels a little more alive. The air moves gently. It was very static before.
This is pretty new, this change, but I'm noticing it's allowing other effects to display themselves. Last week when I was very excited about something, there were little balls of buzzing blue energy floating like fairy lights here and there in the marsh as I waded through. When that potentiality didn't come through, they went full zappy one night, discharging all of that energy as lightning along with torrential downpour. (It's a remarkably nice little visual metaphor for the way that the excitement/frustration cycle feels in my body -- buzzing potential energy that builds, and then sharp storms that crest with fury if it doesn't come through. I'm curious what it would have been like if the thing had happened and the excitement had become reality.)
I think the swampening correlates to me trying to pop the lid on my emotional health over the past year or so. It's been terrible for the last several years, as well as profoundly deprioritized. It's scary to feel things bubbling up and try to learn to cope with them. These visual metaphors help by giving me an intuitive route into facing how I'm feeling, which I'd become pretty good at downplaying, pushing aside, and generally trying to dismiss.
I'm not sure the house will come back, but all of these gardens thus far have been two-lobed in some manner. Green used to be lobed top (the treehouse) and bottom (the grotto); I'm interested to see if it reprises any of that, or if it tries to provide a structure again. I think the deep hole into the abzu is still there, but with the water everywhere that tunnel is less center stage.
In order to pass through Green these days I have to wade through deep and murky water, as there's no clear path of high ground. That's okay: the water is communication, not threat, and it's never tried to drown me. I do get hella muddy, though, and I think some of this water feeds Orange, a few gardens down.
