Hedgespace

It doesn’t happen all the time for me, but occasionally I will have meditation sessions where especially stronger hypnogic/hypnopompic visions (though I’m not really “asleep” so those both feel like incorrect terms for it). Recently I had one that was especially vivid and persisted for “some amount of time” that was difficult to gauge in the moment without breaking the inward experience.

I seemed to drop into something that I would call Hedgespace, a sort of adjacent (but interpentrating with ours) parallel hyperdimension (??), where … let’s say the intelligence of woody-stemmed plants is able to express itself fully in any physical form or configuration it is equipped for, where it has perhaps its domain of power.

It was closed eye visuals of like stems of hedges, and especially willow which I’ve been handling and working with a lot, and felt very psychedelic in its interactivity, kaleidoscopic, and fractal nature. The stems and cuttings and branches and whatnot were like moving and re-arranging themselves in response to my inward interactions. It felt somehow like navigating the “latent space” of the natural AI of the plants.

Like I said, I have been going deep on trees, coppicing, getting into green woodworking. Projects starting to come in hot and heavy now that the snow is almost all melted. This first one I made on Sunday, a shave horse for shaping green (undried) wood with a draw knife. You push the pedals forward with your feet, and it clamps your wood in place, so you can cut and pull with the draw knife.

Legs are all cockamamie because I didn’t know how to really align or angle them correctly or consistently. I’ll learn that in subsequent tries though, as I’m excited to make more stuff using these techniques. It feels very magical af to be able to turn a tree that fell (the poplar for the bench), and others that I coppiced (the willow sticks), and to turn them into a physical piece of furniture you can sit on and do work on. I love it. Lots more coming down that road for me, I can already see.

And I planted over the past few days a batch of ~80 of so of my own willow cuttings, and another 50 of ones I bought in of diverse genetics from an Ontario farm seller.

I have probably another 100 or so kicking around that I’ll do another dense planting like this of. The set up consists of thick brown paper rolled out, overlapping, covered in tons of woodchips to about 3 inches. The first I didn’t cut the grass that was there and left it underneath, the second I did ad nicked it down hard to the ground. I made the mistake of putting these into water too soon and letting them break dormancy before the ground was unfrozen, so some of them started to leaf out already. But I think it’s fine, and it’s the best I can do with what I’ve got.

Also cut a bunch of wild dogwood I found near a lake, and was really wild to see how easily the low branches layer into the mud, root, and resprout like it’s nothing. So I coppiced a bunch, and then helped layer in some more, and then stuck in cuttings to see if I could shore up the little streambed that emerges there and slow its eventual erosion. I will take some of those cuttings from that batch and try to install the first of possibly several fascines to see if I can’t do some other erosion control facing the Big River as well. Hedgespace is in my blood now. There’s no going back.