A Different Kind of Tree (A Balm for Comparison and Longing in the Artistic Life, or How to Be in Right Relationship with Artistic Influences)

It is exhilarating to get into Sophie Strand. It’s clear that she reads deeply in a few areas of primary focus (ecology, mythology, biology, and of course, creative literature), but also that she continually sprinkles into the stew (or the compost heap, as she might say) supplemental reading in history and other subjects. She brings all of these elements together (including her deep, lifelong relationship with the Hudson Valley) to create a cohesive, recognizable worldview, and I think that’s one of the hallmarks of a great artist. Artists—most especially writers—must keep chasing their primary enthusiasms while not neglecting other domains of study. Like tending an ever-brewing stew.

The week I got into her work, I had a late-winter fissure on my left index finger, and I happened to be bedding down an assortment of apothecary herb seeds for a little kitchen windowsill garden. Only marginally aware, at the time, that soil positively teems with microbiota, I didn’t realize I had invited microscopic sprinkles of the seething holobiont directly into my body.

In the following days, a small brown swirl formed beneath the skin, like a cinnamon design on a latte. Then an archipelago of scabs the color of dry soil. Then tectonic yellow crusts over inflamed, smarting skin. Impetigo, thy name is: a skin infection that can occur when certain bacteria—commonly Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pyogenes—enter a break in the skin barrier. I joked with the pharmacist that it looked like my finger was decomposing.

And, in a manner of speaking, it was. The bacteria release toxins and enzymes that break down proteins in the epidermis and disrupt the skin barrier. Organic material is enzymatically digested. The boundary where life holds itself together begins to soften.

But the bacteria were not foreign invaders. They are participants in a larger ecology, living within the soil and even on the surface of human skin, held at bay by intact boundaries and immune vigilance.

Around this same time, I began reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and images of mycelial connection and the strange aliveness of fungal decay interwove in my imagination.

Meditations on the broader ecology of influences that feed my own writerly well began to emerge—not least because I felt a fire lit under me after discovering Sophie, but also because I have been tilting my life more and more in the direction of writing, and I want to do so from a place of authenticity. I want to write from the thread I alone hold in the great weave—from my own small neighborhood in the tapestry of souls. Not from someone else’s thread.

This is a continual tension within the creative world. It has been said that all art is a “remix,” and it is certainly true that we cannot avoid influence—whether we are writing, making visual art, forming a band, or building a business. Yet I have often felt troubled by the question of where influence ends and appropriation begins; when credit is due versus when one is simply shaped by a lineage; when one is still emerging from a kind of private apprenticeship of influence in early artistic development. And also how to behave ethically, while maintaining good relationships with mentors and creative kin.

Years ago, I created a “Lineages & Influences Tree” as a way to visualize my own polyphony of influences—people, traditions, lineages, enthusiasms—which, though inextricably connected to a broader ecology, still remains uniquely my own. From this, I believe, my voice emerges (or—hopefully—will continue to emerge).

This image can quell the anxiety of leaning too heavily toward any one influence. It can also serve as a balm for envy and comparison. (“If only I had been raised this way, in this place…”) You were raised in the way and in the place that you were. And that, too, has its own value.

A creative detour can also be an influence. Into what world did you detour? You can weave that into the tree. No one has lived the exact life you have. No two trees are alike.

To offer a personal example: I sometimes feel late in fully stepping into my vocation as a writer because I am, by nature, multi-vocational. When there is much to synthesize—much creative wound alchemy to metabolize before a true voice can emerge—it may take longer. And that is all right. What unfolds over a longer developmental arc can lend depth, richness, and gravity.

We can allow our beloved influences and lineages—the dead and the living—to compost within us. And more than likely, there are additional influences in the heap of which we are scarcely aware, but which breathe through us and leave indelible marks on all we create.

Thanks to mupirocin and my immune system, my finger is slowly healing after being pricked by the bumptious, chaotic, teeming spinning wheel of nature. The delicate balance—Staphylococcus aureus living only on the surface of my skin—is being restored, though it and thousands of other microbial species continue to live on me and within me.

It feels like a metaphor for allowing the inevitability of influence while also coming home to the unique thread I temporarily represent in the vast garment of life. A metaphor for the complex, delicate, and somehow inevitable process of coming into right relationship.

So, my sincerely treasured readers: keep chasing your primary enthusiasms, but throw other spices into the pot as well. A carrot stew is tastiest with garlic, sea salt, freshly cracked pepper, butter, and thyme… And if you ever feel the sting of delay, behindness, or comparison, you can remind yourself:

I am a different kind of tree.