Only recently, I have begun to view my life in more geometrical ways. What for many years felt like a vast and often unruly richness now reveals an inner geometry. Lived experience, with all its texture, emotion, expansion, and insight, forms the x-axis. Meaning making and articulation form the y-axis, the impulse to give language and coherence to what would otherwise remain diffuse.
Both have been present for a long time. And yet, for all their richness, these two dimensions did not always create stability. Much remained vibrant, but unheld. Full, but drifting. What has entered only recently is the z-axis: clarity and structure. And with it, something shifts. What once seemed at risk of falling apart reveals itself differently. It did not fall apart. It fell together. What I have lived and understood begins to hold.
As I circle my garden and prepare for the new season, I find myself returning to climbing plants. They seem to embody this principle particularly well. Left to themselves, they grow in all directions at once. There is beauty in that. But when a trellis is introduced, something changes. The plant does not become less alive. It rises. Its growth gathers. What was already present begins to take form.
The trellis does not create the life. It allows it to rise. Perhaps this is true more broadly. What appears coherent, effortless, or complete rarely stands on beauty alone. Beneath it, there is often a structure: quiet, functional, and rarely noticed. Not the source of life, but the condition that allows it to rise.
Structure, at its best, is not a limitation. It is the hidden architecture that allows what is already alive to take its vertical form.