Dear readers,
We have come to the end of an exciting first year for Umbel & Panicle. We have explored many emotions and textual layers, starting from seed and ending with graft. There is sadness, there is joy, there is hope, there is anger and rage against an unfeeling and uncaring world. Yet, in the end, we come to rest and look forward to the future.
Graft is an interesting theme/subject/topic in that it challenges us to examine its full meaning(s). In horticultural terms, grafting simply means adding on a part of one plant to another member of the same species in the hope of producing a new cultivar, bearing fruits or ensuring that the plant survives. Sometimes, grafting works. Sometimes, it's only met with marginal success. Most of the time, it fails spectacularly.
Our lives are like that. Many of us see ourselves as hybrids, a combination of many things, a chimera with many parts. Many of us too have grafted new things into our lives, into our identities. Like cyborgs and mutants from horrific experiments, we often live with the consequences. We want to be rid of these grafts, but they sustain us and ironically make us whole, whatever whole is.
Jessica Seaborn's "Strong Hold" is beautiful with the duality of self/plant. Cora Buhlert's "Experiment" is funny, a child's daring experiment with making new things, and poignant with the realization that things will fail in life. The only thing is to try again.
There is also a gentle sense of beauty in Eva Papasoulioti's "Olives Us" and "Distance". Read with the breeze in your hair and the soft ache in your heart. Hold that hope in your mind.
Enjoy the photographs by Darin Wahl and feel inspired by the promise of new growth and change.
Ultimately, grafting ensures a future for the plant and this is what we are going to aiming for: the future. It might look bleak now, the news often hard to stomach, the pain too real and raw... but we gird ourselves with the promise of a future where we can love ourselves and others, grafts and all.
May 2018 be filled with hope, dreams and growth.
Joyce
Editor-in-Chief
We have come to the end of an exciting first year for Umbel & Panicle. We have explored many emotions and textual layers, starting from seed and ending with graft. There is sadness, there is joy, there is hope, there is anger and rage against an unfeeling and uncaring world. Yet, in the end, we come to rest and look forward to the future.
Graft is an interesting theme/subject/topic in that it challenges us to examine its full meaning(s). In horticultural terms, grafting simply means adding on a part of one plant to another member of the same species in the hope of producing a new cultivar, bearing fruits or ensuring that the plant survives. Sometimes, grafting works. Sometimes, it's only met with marginal success. Most of the time, it fails spectacularly.
Our lives are like that. Many of us see ourselves as hybrids, a combination of many things, a chimera with many parts. Many of us too have grafted new things into our lives, into our identities. Like cyborgs and mutants from horrific experiments, we often live with the consequences. We want to be rid of these grafts, but they sustain us and ironically make us whole, whatever whole is.
Jessica Seaborn's "Strong Hold" is beautiful with the duality of self/plant. Cora Buhlert's "Experiment" is funny, a child's daring experiment with making new things, and poignant with the realization that things will fail in life. The only thing is to try again.
There is also a gentle sense of beauty in Eva Papasoulioti's "Olives Us" and "Distance". Read with the breeze in your hair and the soft ache in your heart. Hold that hope in your mind.
Enjoy the photographs by Darin Wahl and feel inspired by the promise of new growth and change.
Ultimately, grafting ensures a future for the plant and this is what we are going to aiming for: the future. It might look bleak now, the news often hard to stomach, the pain too real and raw... but we gird ourselves with the promise of a future where we can love ourselves and others, grafts and all.
May 2018 be filled with hope, dreams and growth.
Joyce
Editor-in-Chief