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The main message behind this project is one intended to unite people from all walks of life and provide them with some inspiration to strive towards happiness, whatever that might mean for any given individual. The piece "Rhizome" was initially inspired by a passage I read in one of Carl Jung's books:
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”
This in turn made me want to more deeply explore the idea of a rhizome. Botanically speaking, a rhizome is basically a subterranean stem. It contains deposits of reserve food material that give it the ability to produce shoots which emerge at the upper surface and root systems that go down to the soil below. The plant (or tree) is then able to survive unexpected, harsh conditions such as unfavorable seasonal weather underground to later re-appear as a healthy, new version of itself aboveground once conditions improve. Rhizomes make it possible for enormous communities of life to sprout from the same “root.” Pando, for example, also known as The Trembling Giant, is a clonal colony of a single aspen tree that, at an estimated 80,000 years old, is the single, oldest, most massive living organism on Earth.
After learning all of this information and having had some fascinating conversations with people throughout the world about the different struggles they have undergone throughout their lives, I grew to embrace the idea of a rhizome because we are all experiencing extremely similar situations throughout this planet and are all connected somehow; we are all "shoots" from the same rhizome. The song "Espejos" (which is spanish for "Mirrors") similarly talks of how we are all reflections of each other and how it's such a tragedy that we continue to fight wars with each other and perform irrational acts of violence such as what happened in Newton, Connecticut. Although other pieces/songs in the project deal with different things, this is the one I hold in highest esteem.