The rhizome can be helpful to understand my thinking. A sudden thought on a bike ride like a camouflaged spear of asparagus or a potato that can be cooked in a new way. The negative thinking of stage fright, anxiety, or imposter syndrome like couch grass appearing when you least want it to and requiring extensive and ongoing effort to keep under control, but never possible to fully eradicate. A circle of convergence during singing practice, when everything suddenly and fleetingly falls exactly into place, like the momentary pleasure of eating a perfectly ripe raspberry on a balmy summer evening. Yet, these valuable insights aside, my intuition tells me that rhizomes are not up to the task of representing the complex dynamics at play in my practice. Horticultural fidelity forces me to accept that, intricate webs of roots and metaphorical lines of flight notwithstanding, rhizomes are still clearly identifiable organisms in and of themselves. Their offshoots remain potatoes (as delicious as their various preparations can be) and asparagus spears (however their consumption mysteriously alters my body’s chemistry). When I think about the spiral of experiential learning or do a simple Google image search for ‘concentric spirals’, I encounter images that resonate more deeply with my ideas of artistry, beauty, and inspiration than a potato. Therefore, my intuition led me to limit rhizomatic thinking to the structure of my thesis and search elsewhere for the metaphorical breathing that connects everything in my constellation of praxical spheres. The rhizome is the blade of couch grass, raspberry, or asparagus. It cannot be the breathing of my metaphorical methodology since it requires this breathing just as much as my tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, little Amandine, and xyr relatives and fruity friends (lest I forget the figs!). But luckily we have mycorrhizal networks.
