IN RESONANCE WITH THE EARTH
We are pleased to introduce new materials for this section of our journal. We see poiesis as providing the basis for human beings' creative responses to the world of nature. The arts in particular offer forms that crystallize these responses in ways that touch and move us. "In Resonance with the Earth" contains poetry, artworks, photography and essays relevant to this theme. In this issue of the journal, this section includes poetry and the photographs by Merve Kurt.
HOLLOW
Merve Kurt
is a PhD researcher in Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland-UK. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, poet, artist, and practitioner working at the intersection of expressive arts, ecological thought, and social justice. She holds graduate degrees in social sciences and humanities, and her current research explores ecopoiesis, posthumanism, and cinematic aesthetics. With over a decade of experience working with international NGOs and in community-based humanitarian projects, she integrates critical theory with creative practice to examine human–nature relations, ethical aesthetics, and the healing potential of art. Her poetic and visual works reflect a commitment to more-than-human narratives, affective ecologies, and transformative imaginaries. She currently resides between Edinburgh, UK and Diyarbakır, Turkey.
Hollow
A tree with a broken branch
still finds a way to grow;
its trunk bends to the storms,
its roots reach down
into the deep of earth.
There it meets the water
that cracks the stone,
befriends the insects,
becomes their nest,
life goes on in the dark.
At the break, a hollow
first, a pause of space:
a wound.
a shoulder now less full,
a song gone silent in the middle.
The wind
carries in seed without a home.
A damp-smelling nest is made there.
Moss,
or a sleepless daisy,
a coolness that rests the shade.
A bird alights on the threshold,
sings with the insistence taught by rain.
A rabbit shelters in the trunk,
wears the darkness like a home.
A squirrel leaves its walnuts,
knowing it will return one day.
Time passes, rain arrives,
the soil strokes the wounds.
The broken place drinks water faster,
reaches its core more quickly,
and one morning,
a small, thin shoot
straightens from the tree’s wound.
Sprouting branches
a reminder to begin again,
and from the broken place
a path is found.
Deep in the earth,
in the heart of its roots.
And the day will come
when that shoot gives shade to others;
a fox cools beneath it,
it rests the fine wings of a butterfly.
A child leans on its trunk,
unknowing, yet knowing,
that they hold to an old wound.
Even with death waiting at its nape,
life keeps laying down roots.
A seed knows the road to green
in the stone’s ruby hue.
Co-Sensing with Trees: An Ecopoietic Reflection
Walking among trees, when considered together with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the body as “a perceptual field opening onto the fabric of the world,” [3] becomes a movement that carries a person back to their own sensory roots and opens the door to the rich imaginative world of resilience. When that door opens, what appears is a way of loosening the human-cantered gaze and making the boundary between the human and the natural porous. As the ecopoiesis approach explains, creation emerges from the shared vibration between human and environment, aligning the human with nature and inviting them into a carnival of images of resilience, flexibility, and the multiplying of life. In this sense, every step taken among the trees becomes an act of co-creation and co-sensing. This poem, too, came into the world through the co-sensing that arose within me, in the witnessing and inspiration of trees.
Figure 1. Hewlêr (Erbil), Kurdistan — 2022 (by Merve Kurt)
Within this field of co-creation, trees offer one of the most powerful images. For me, they are an archetypal, ecological, and phenomenological teacher all at once. Their rise as axis mundi in Jung’s collective unconscious corresponds to the human desire to be connected to both sky and earth at the same time [2]. When read through Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the material imagination, the trunk, the root, the hollow, decay, and rebirth become images that open one’s inner spaces [1]. In its own language, the tree speaks to me of cyclicality, transformation, fragility, and endurance, and with its gentle and considerate imagery opens my heart to the truth of life.
Figure 2. Pitlochry, Scotland — 2025 (by Merve Kurt)
The hollow left by a broken branch becomes, for me, a threshold image within ecological thought. I photographed these threshold moments with respect. I do not see these hollows as an “absence,” but as multilayered and transformative new spaces where matter’s creative agency becomes visible. The tree does not retreat from the place where it breaks; that place becomes a new site of circulation for environmental forces. It draws moisture, receives seeds, becomes a home for many beings, and carries the rain inward. When the wound is seen without naming it through binaries such as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, it becomes a space of generativity. What is ecopoietic emerges precisely here, showing the capacity of life human and more-than-human to reconstruct itself on broken surfaces, each in its own being, rhythm, cycle, and language.
Figure 3. Croatia — 2025 (by Merve Kurt)
The counterpart of this ecological teaching within the human intersects with ecopsychology’s central question: how does a person live with the place where they have broken? As Theodore Roszak writes in his critique of the nature–mind split, healing moves beyond being only an individual process [4]. It passes through that space and becomes an ecological reconnection, or it moves from the ecological into the individual. It is reciprocal, cyclical. Tree imagery opens both the sensory and intuitive layers of this reconnection. Encountering a hollow can open a space where a person sees their own internal emptiness or wounds not with guilt, but as doorways into new forms of life. Seen this way, the state of life sprouting and flowing from anywhere becomes visible.
Figure 4. Edinburgh, Scotland — 2025 (by Merve Kurt)
The photographs accompanying this text carry both the teaching and the witnessing of these images for me. The moss-covered cut surface, the rain-brightened crack, the line where roots split stone all were remnants of my conversations with trees, small offerings from their imaginal gifts. As Bachelard says, an image is not only something seen, but something that “opens a new mode of being in us” [1]. These images invited me to think with them. The more I looked at a tree’s wound, the more the fragility and insistence of both nature and life became visible together, and each hollow felt like an invitation into another form of aliveness.
Figure 5. Edinburgh, Scotland — 2025 (by Merve Kurt)
The poem at the centre of this writing was born from these images. The resilience of trees which is their way of standing by bending, sprouting from the places where they break, and turning their wounds into shelter that offers a form of inner wisdom that becomes available to anyone who pauses long enough to witness it. The source of each image in the poem reflects the kinds of scenes through which nature teaches resilience without assigning anything as “good” or “bad”. Water cracking stone, small lives moving quietly in darkness, coolness forming a home within a hollow, and, at last, a thin shoot rising from the wound… These moments reveal how nature models the capacity to endure, to transform, and to hold experience without judgment and inviting the human observer into a more spacious understanding of what it means to go on living.
Ecopoiesis, as life’s resistance to turning the wound into a site of generativity, became a poetic manifestation here something that grows and holds space. This resistance resonates both in the psychodynamic world of the human and in the constantly moving fabric of the ecosystem, which is profoundly affecting.
If for a tree a rupture becomes a passageway into a new lifeline, a new rhythm, a new sprout, then a person, too, can come into relationship with their wound when they can hear the slow, resilient, soft knowledge of nature and perhaps transform that wound into a home through gentleness and care.
This poem emerged as an echo of the trees’ wisdom about life. And in the photographs that accompany it, there is gratitude for the existence of trees.
References
- Bachelard, G. (1964). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Jung, C. G. (1969). Archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.
- Roszak, T. (1992). The voice of the Earth. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Reference for citations
Kurt, M. (2025). Hollow. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 6(2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)