let’s take that thing that bamboo does

Bamboo is a rhizome. It grows from the ground up. It grows laterally below the surface of the ground, and it sends up more vertical shoots.It’s so successful as a species, it can be considered invasive… But it is, it is, beautiful.Imagine that bamboo grew laterally – so laterally in all directions that it went all the way around the earth – and met itself. This happens with the mangroves in the tributaries of the Amazon. I have seen it: They grow all the way around the edge of a body of water, and it can be difficult to land your boat. A rugged species.

Let’s take that thing that bamboo does, and exaggerate it. Let’s give it a territory to take over. Let’s give that territory a Euclidian geometry; a sphere. When it “grows” around the sphere, it will radiate out from the center, up, down, left, right, toward you, away from you. Each sphere will be dense at the center and, as the bamboo radiates outward, less and less dense at its periphery. At the center of these spheres, the bamboo will converge and be dense. At the periphery, a more aerated sphere.

A single bamboo sphere might make you think of tumbleweed. But I don’t imagine one of these, I imagine several. And when I imagine more than one, I don’t think tumbleweed rolling around somwewhere. I think about how they would poke into each other and lock together. Like burrs in a wool shirt in the fall. We will let them lock together. We will throw them one on top of the next, and make an aerated mound of them. They will catch together, composing themselves. They will encourage their own connections, but eschew finicky composition. This seems appropriate.