What is a rhizome spirit?

What is a rhizome spirit? I hope over time, by sharing and writing within this blog, to begin to truly understand this spirit that I feel deeply and strongly within me.

I would love to hear others thoughts as well, since the fundamental nature of the rhizome is as Deleuze and Guattari say, "and . . . and . . . and . . ." and not either/or.

The word "rhizome" became a philosophic word, and I would claim a spiritual word, through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In their work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they create a vision of reality that is filled with what they call "lines of flight" and give us the wonderful image of the "rhizome" as compared to the "tree."

They write:

A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. . . . Rats are rhizomes. p6-7

The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potatoe and couchgrass or the weed. p7

Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. p7

A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. . . . p9

The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. . . . the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. p21

. . . the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation of sexuality—but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artifical—that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of “becomings.” p21

The challenge that I have is to recognize the rhizomatic nature of my life and embrace it. I often resist this nature and strive to find a more settled, a more comforting tree-like vision with which to view the world, a view that comes from traditional religion for example.

However, when I open myself to my true nature I do come upon a rhizome spirit that lies within.

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and . . . and . . . and . . .” p25