Trees

I wrote my last article, Rocky Planet, Fleshy Heart, pressed the send button and left my friend’s house to walk for six days and to sleep in a tent for seven nights.

We walked 138 km with

Nathalie Sejean

, carrying our homes on our backs. With each step we earned the sights our eyes saw, the smells our nose caught, and the sounds our ears captured. We felt quite rich. When we came back, when my muscles were still fresh from walking, I dreamt of penning two articles back-to-back about walking our planet.

But I fell ill and ended up lying down, unable to lift a finger.

The walking articles are postponed for now since I am freshly coming out of a sickness and immobility rather than a walking journey. My muscles’ most recent memory is fever.

Hence, I thought I would share something else with you, something I am able to do. If I am failing to walk at the moment both physically and mentally, I may spend some writing time with the ones who do not walk but rather hold onto our planetary rock and root: Trees.

Here are the trees I have been drawing since mid-May.

I drew the largest one this week while sick.

Immobility and boredom got on my nerves and I laid a white paper to see how fever and drawing would get along. The first couple of days I could hardly hold the pen and hold my head above my shoulders. Then I drew three minutes here, three minutes there. My pen shook because I had fever and my lines got wobbly because I was exhausted by the virus. But I continued drawing. In the days that followed, the tree began to take shape and I finished it as my sickness simultaneously wore off. Drawing helped again.

Drawing has this superpower to help me out in my times of trouble, especially when I feel troubled because I cannot move. I call this my creative cave syndrome. Since I find myself stuck in a place and time often, I use this energy to create and express what comes through me.

If my memory is not tricking me, I drew my first individual trees back in 2020 during Taurus season. I drew two pieces, one small, one big and named them Floating Trees because they were suspended in air. I have always found rooting and settling the most unsettling so my trees ended up floating. It was the beginning of the pandemic, we were in lockdown, the neighbourhood was very loud and I was trying to work on a story about plants. Again, I was struggling to write and there drawing was, helping me out.

Then, the summer of that very year, one day out of nowhere I started crying. Something was ripping my soul apart and I did not know what, why and how. I must have cried a river that day, or at least a small lake. And the only way I could soothe my sadness and tears was drawing tree-like creatures. I drew many of them, some green, some yellow, orange and brown. They looked a bit like corals as well. Luckily, their little branches and fingers calmed me down and wiped out my tears, so my eyes did not fall out of their sockets.

There was this fig tree in my neighbourhood that was very dear to me. I would see her whenever I climbed up and down the steep road. We would always share a moment, exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide. I would track the seasons through her changing nature, admire her bare skeleton as well as her green and yellow leaves. My mother loved figs and fig trees, I did not until she taught me to love them.

The day after the tears and drawing trees, I went out to run some errands and I came across with an empty sky where the fig once stood, crowded with her branches. She was cut, butchered and thrown on the floor. That was it—the reason of my sadness explained. Perhaps I was drawing trees when the fig was being cut. Perhaps the tree was connecting with me through creativity as my species destroyed her while she was bearing fruits. She may have announced her departure to the neighbourhood in mysterious ways and my share was drawing… with my tears, shapes and colours.

Creativity moves in mysterious ways.

Now, four years later, there are hardly any fig trees left in the neighbourhood. I remember most of them and their places, and I miss them. The unstoppable desire and greed, mankind has for concrete ever growing, ever green and ever wrong! So is my desire to be aware of my other-than-human kin, feel them and tell wilder and wider stories that encompass our inter-species relationships.

Back to Twenty Twenty Four, I am still with black ink and white paper. The two materials I have in hand. If one wishes to express themselves, it is possible to do so with simple and accessible materials like a pen and a paper. When I was young, I thought art was a hungry beast that required a lot of money. Sure, creativity can become very expensive. And there are many things I cannot do (yet) because I lack the space and funds but this does not prevent me from imagining and creating with what I have. I come from a modest background and I fought hard to retrieve my creativity from the deepest and darkest caves. I would rather imagine with imagination, create with creativity than spend lots of money and be intimidated by expensive art materials, at least for now. We’ll see what time brings or brings not.

Have a mentioned that I have an imaginary exhibition?

Yes, I have an imaginary exhibition.

Very much like an imaginary friend, it fills an emptiness in my life.

Entertaining the possibility of an exhibition in my mind creates a bridge between my art and the human world in my heart and mind. I keep finding myself musing what kind of exhibition I would build around planetary creativity. And I am slowly creating it which makes it less and less imaginary… more and more imaginative.

Trees are a part of that exhibition. I imagine them having a wall of their own. A Gizegen¹ forest. I have been noticing that I am drawing the trees on their own. Almost like individual portraits. But by drawing many, I feel like I am giving them back to each other, creating a little forest for them to be with one another. Because a tree shall never be a separate being, no matter how small we make their world. No matter with how much concrete we surround them, the mere being of a tree invites other beings and creates a hub.

Considering that the papers I draw on comes from the trees, it only feels right to give them back something in return; a drawing, a painting, a story, a wall.

Thank you, trees. And thank you, fellow humans, for reading.

Gizem Gizegen, 2024 Istanbul, ☉ Gemini ☽ Virgo

1. Gizegen is my imaginary planet. Gizegen is a word play where two words gizem (my name, which also means mystery) and gezegen (which means planet, wanderer in Turkish) merge and become Gizegen. We can roughly translate it as Gizem’s planet and/or mystery’s planet. In its essence, Gizegen encompasses my creative journey.