Roots

“Some strengths cannot be built. They can only be remembered.

A figure rises from the earth, branches extending upward from where a body ends and the world begins. This is not a person standing on the ground. This is a person growing out of it.

We are taught, in modern lives, to think of ourselves as separate from what holds us. Independence has been sold to us as the highest form of adulthood. But every version of us that has ever felt genuinely rooted knew something else: we do not become sturdy alone. We become sturdy by belonging — to a place, a lineage, a body, a piece of earth that agreed to keep us upright.

This painting isn’t about a tree.

It’s about the ground you have quietly been drawing from all along.

What is currently rooting you — and when did you last thank it for holding you upright?”