Alison Hawthorne Deming

Walking is part of my writing process. Walking in the plant world is particularly generative. I can’t say why this is, only that it is. It has to do with scale—the enveloping nature of trees or towering cacti sheltering me. It has to do with green fruition—the plant world’s brilliant strategy of simply transforming sunlight into sustenance. It has to do with fragrance and softened air, as a breeze riffles through leaves. I become small in the green world and yet my imagination breathes more freely than it does at the desk and ideas come at me like photons. It has to do with the fact that nature is the most aesthetically complicated and satisfying thing a person can experience. It has to do with the reality that nature always provides new sensory data that serves as analog to whatever is going on in my inner life. And when it’s a writing project that’s going on, I often find some phenomenon in nature that is precisely the metaphor I needed to move forward on the page. “Kissing Trees” is an excerpt from my newly completed book-length meditation on art and science titled MOBIUS.