In my twenties, I regularly described myself by saying,

“I’ve never met anyone so at war with themself.”

I was stuck between the limited space in the prescription of who I should be

and the vast wildness of what I felt within.

Love and acceptance seemed to come from keeping myself small.

I fought and clung to the confines. 

Years later, I know,

our bodies carry our stories of conflict:

all the times our needs weren’t met,

all the times that who we are misaligned with what was expected.

Layer by layer, ring by ring, year by year.

Each story is held within and shapes us. 

In this I find myself mirrored by the trees.

When you cut a tree open, a memoir is there, too.

Each ring bears physical representation of drought or times of plenty.

I made the ceramic pieces in this work from slabs of clay, 

pressed into the cross-sections of tree stumps.

What looks like muscle are the textures of annual growth rings,

and the cracks that come as the tree weathers once cut down. 

They are a life, captured in one body, 

imprinted into the raw materials of earth 

and reshaped to reflect me, 

another body that holds so much.

Years later, my body and story bear witness

not only to conflict but also to transformation.

What if the difference between war and peace is a choice,

an understanding from within rather than a treaty with the external?

Am I perpetuating the war by rejecting myself anew?

Is my action more than simply reaction?

Where am I living from?

I have been both root bound and shallow breathed,

the tender shoot and the towering, expansive oak.

Now I am all of those things in every moment.

Sweet, contradictory peace.