On Women and Plants, or Considering Human Duality

When I realized that trees could talk, which led me to briefly write about it, I inevitably started to get more interested in botany. It was a subject I always fascinated myself with, I had read beautiful poems about nature in general (Emily Dickinson is almost like a big sister to me), as well as some books focused more on the science side of plants, but what has happened lately with me is that, inexplicably, through all the paths I follow in what concerns the search for art to distract me, I have come across works that deal centrally with themes of nature. I read, yesterday, at a period of three hours, a book about a woman whose personal afflictions led her to want to turn into a tree. It’s that kind of book that is so well written that, throughout the reading, you wonder if it would not be man’s natural course to eventually turn into plants. If we are dust of the stars, why couldn’t we one day discover that we are roots of a tree? This is what this book asks (and leaves you wondering). Today I watched a randomly chosen movie about a disease that causes flowers to grow inside women, and at the same time as these flowers serve to cure other diseases, they kill their incubators (the women who ‘give birth’ them). I do not know if the universe is trying to send me a sign or anything like that, but as usual, these coincidences make me think.

A woman who wants to turn into a tree. You will think that she is simply tired of the life she leads, or that her mental disturbances are driving her into dementia, but every now and then she wonders, why not? Why not? Why not trust and believe that trees have the balanced duality of stability and instability that we want to achieve but that there has not yet been a man in this world capable of this achievement and therefore trees are the models to be followed? The feeling here is that we are not really living in this world, and it goes beyond the “living, not just existing.” The feeling is that we exist, we live, we experience, but something is always missing. The ability we have to plan our futures, something that comes from stability, is often not prudently used because we don’t know, we don’t experience everything we have to know. It is instability. But in the case of trees, they survive under a natural balance that is far from human reach, and this leads us to idealize them.

Women who give birth to flowers. I don’t thik there is a more beautiful allegory for the birth of life than this. But what happens when these flowers are poisonous? What happens when life is not so kind to us, striking us in varied and painful ways, from everywhere, giving us the impression that perhaps living and existing are questionable? It is undoubtedly healthy to question them, and I would dare to say that this is even part of the creative process that is the construction of the history of men’s lives. To see life only from the point of view of lyricism without understanding it in the vision of the library that holds all this poetry leads the edification of our beings to the ruins. The existentialists already said, there is reason in the destruction, with it being the taste for freedom that, hopefully, will teach us and make us understand that the checkpoint is creation.

Perhaps what really seduces us is the possibility of feeling the light of the sun touching our leaves and illuminating our surroundings through the spaces between them — is what the Japanese call komorebi, the light that seeps through the leaves. Maybe we just want to feel the depth of the beauty and softness of a flower, and how both its birth and its death (the stable and the unstable) are beautiful, because it is born and we love it, and it dies because we want to enchant the other. Perhaps what matters to us is that we feel ourselves present in this life that we live, which goes beyond living; it is the connection with this world that only these plants, which men worship so much, possess. To feel this presence, we must be able to cope (and be reciprocal) with the custom of silencing ourselves, silencing our minds, when we are close to what is nature. At all times we are creating dialogues in our minds, but when alone in a garden, there is no such need. We make ourselves presents simply by being there. We’re not only living this moment, or existing within it. Perhaps this is the reason for women to turn into trees and give birth to flowers in modern art — really, art is the only thing capable of turning the ideal into the real.