Revisiting Metaphor: A Walk in the Woods
Can closing your eyes help you see the forest for the trees?
The shifting tides had swallowed the beach by the time I reached the estuary. The water, acting as a gatekeeper, barred my path along the muddy flats that had held my footprints so many times before. Undeterred, I worked my way up to higher ground. I bushwhacked through the tall grasses and shrubs growing along the embankment that braced the land against the oncoming seawater. The going was slow and winding, with blades of grass tickling and scraping at my legs.
As I pondered along this new approach into the estuary, I thought about how the high tide had changed my experience in the environment. On previous visits, the entrance to the estuary had always opened up to an expanse of mud and multi-colored shells. The water had now completely engulfed the beach, warding off any land-dwelling visitors. I came to see the high water level as a sentinel of the shore. This unconscious body of water had influenced my conscious actions, and consequently I began to experience and understand the environment differently.
A dialogic relationship between our means of interacting with the objects we encounter and our metaphors causes each to inform the other. As the nature of our interactions with our environment shifts, the metaphorical connections we make can change in nature as well, which can envoke further changes in the ways we treat our surroundings — a positive feedback loop can ensue. Metaphor is more than a poetic device; it is intrinsic to our process of finding and making meaning in the world around us. Restructuring our metaphors can enable a renewed understanding of our environments, and therefore new relationships with our surroundings as well.
The spaces we move through are richly populated with ‘objects’, whether they be trees, the weather, or anything else that we give a name. These cohabitants of our environments endlessly reform and rearrange themselves, creating new points of contact between objects. The tide rolls in and out. Leaves blush with the warm colors of autumn and fall to the ground. The objects which cohabitate our spaces are constantly in states of movement and change, leading to ever-changing connections.
The tree is not a dancer and the dancer is not a tree, and yet each is the metaphor running through me
Through metaphor, we identify these points of contact. The wind may blow through the leaves grouped at the top of a tall, slender alder, bending the tree’s body to and fro – a dancer gracefully swaying to a steady rhythm. Metaphor allows us to bring something outside of ourselves into the realm of human experience. By equating one object with another, we are also implicitly stating our position in relation to both, and proclaiming that connection formed through us as the identity of the object. The tree is not a dancer and the dancer is not a tree, and yet each is the metaphor running through me. Drawing such connections is something we do constantly. Ours is a world steeped in metaphor.
When I began writing about restructuring metaphor out in the woods at my estuary, I started to wonder why I had come out there to write at all. I could have gone through the sterilized, prescribed writing process from the comfort of my desk at home, rather than trekking through blackberry thickets and heavy, black mud. However, I recognized the cohabitants of the space as participants in my ecology of writing. The trees and other objects whispered countless narratives, informing my own experience within the space. The text organically arises out of coming into contact with them, or for those hip with the compositional rhetoric, their ‘rhetorical triangles’. Such immersion leads to a very different product than what I could have produced elsewhere.
To explore different avenues of communion with my environment and of creating metaphor, I tried experimenting with ways of sensing. I came up to a fallen birch, closed my eyes, and leaned into an embrace with the tree. In my mind, associations with the visual rendering of the tree fell away and I became more attuned to the feeling of its cool, papery skin against mine. As I continued this I realized that, without the use of my eyes, so much more of the surrounding environment seeped into my experience of the tree. The sounds of the wind in the trees and leaves falling on the ground, the sensation of the wind on my face — all were part of the birch. The birch was no longer one tree; it encompassed everything happening in that moment, spawning new metaphors of interconnectedness. The tree was a shield against the chilling wind, a steady companion to lean on. Upon opening my eyes this effect was completely lost and couldn’t be recaptured, no matter how I tried.
I also played around with proximity and its effect on metaphor. I tried generating as many metaphorical associations as possible about a mossy tree stump from a distance of about 10 feet away and, to compare, from less than an arms-length away. At the further distance, the moss elicited notions of an infection or plague, crawling up the tree and taking hold of it. The moss was a thick carpet with patches of bright and dark greens, and I could see it spreading up and outward. The tree stump itself had craggily, bumpy bark that reminded me of dragon skin, and for a moment I imagined the stump as the foot of a forest-dwelling dragon.
When I came up close, my perceptions and metaphors drastically shifted. Immediately more complex textures jumped out visually. I could see thousands of little green feathers, hairs, and spirals comprising the moss. It was no longer one big mass on the stump, but rather an assemblage of these individuals. My brain also started counting automatically when I saw the moss in this way, seeing small numbers and clusters of data: How many feathers in this bright patch? One, two, three, four… How many hairs on this feather? Five, six, seven, eight… What had appeared to me from a distance as only randomly dispersed patches of varying greens, now took on a different air as well. I recognized that the darker patches were dying and the more vibrant patches were still towards the middle of their life cycle. The moss became a patchwork quilt of co-mingling growth and decay.
And this is where the magic of it all lies. The moss became something else. Our inherent use of metaphor shapes the cohabitants of our individual realities.
Coming to know my environment in different ways generated a variety of metaphors, shaping the ecology that arose out of our interactions. I realized, too, that no particular metaphor is universally correct or best. Different metaphorical models and ways of exploring are best suited to different needs. To what extent do you find yourself looking at the world around you in the same way, using the same metaphors day after day? Applying the same models and ways of thinking that are considered ‘normal’? If we can adjust our interactions with the spaces around us and restructure our metaphors, we can come to a greater sense of communion and harmony with our environments.
