pen and paper
When I was a child, I used to stand on our family’s deck and give lectures to the trees. I pretended the small woods behind our house were my students. The woods–mostly Eastern Red Oak, with their pointy leaf lobes and abundant acorns–populated mundane play (was I the only Korean kid in The Swiss Family Robinson?), fears and nightmares during dark nighttime storms, and plans for my future (teaching). I walked through the woods many days to go to school, imagining garter snakes were in the thick floor of leaves.
I must have inhaled so much good loamy earthy bacteria in those woods. I loved their height and the green light filtering through them in summer. My sister, fresh from middle school science, taught me about ferns in those woods. My grandparents, who used to live with us, walked us through the woods on the paved path that led to my school. I learned to ride my bike there.
I returned in my mind to that deck and those trees during my sabbatical, during the COVID shutdowns, when we concocted this grant project and wanted, like Arundhati Roy, to beg everyone to remember that, for all its global horrors, the pandemic was also a portal (Roy, 2020). This time I was at a different house of my parents’, which also had a paved path that meandered through woods and connected to a playground. I was reminded of the lessons of the ferns, those “Always First Ancients,” and the way school, woods, and family were seamlessly integrated in my early years. I saw similar verdant light filter through Eastern Red Oak (and many other) leaves.
That sabbatical was an awakening for me. In addition to deep grieving rest, I found words that had left me for many months. I felt like a phoenix, still in the ashes, but reclaiming my form. I was changing color and shape, too, taking creative writing classes and writing poetry in my research papers.
No one gets through academic training, tenure, and peer reviews without a few scratches or gouges in their trunks. We form portals: we keep growing upwards and outwards, providing homes for so many, as we are protected and fed by the electrical and organic networks of fungus and bacteria underneath us. We provide life in our afterlives.
Studies
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