Arisa White’s look after your heart, a permanent, site-specific installation, opened on July 26, 2025 at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (CMBG) in Boothbay. It was commissioned by the Indigo Arts Alliance as part of the Destructing the Boundaries symposia sponsored by Indigo and the Gardens. The installation invites visitors to physically traverse the text among sheltering trees, listening to music composed for the walking meditation, and engaging with themes of healing, rootedness and liberation while immersed in a space connecting the human heart and the natural world.

Walking the palindrome in a woodland garden

A mirror poem for the heart

byArisa White

The look after your heart installation was conceived in the winter months of Maine. Site visits in the snow, imagining what spring promised — the blooms, the color, the people strolling through.

In those early days of the concept phase, photos show me in a down-blanket coat, duck boots disappeared in the snow, looking downward, pensive, feeling for the future to be made.

It appears, in that same head-bowed position, I’m looking at my heart.

We shape our bodies into expression even when we’re simply standing there. And with the poem written on cedar planks, walking and reading forty-five of them, each person would appear to be looking into their hearts.

Now, after weeks of escalating ICE activity in Maine, I see this in retrospect, as I write of the 2025 installation’s conception. Under such terror, my body is alight with vigilance and fear. On cold winter days when sunsets come too soon and long nights draw me inward, I close my eyes to retreat into my own darkness, where my heart holds me in a strong, warm hug.

I wanted a location for the look after your heart installation’s “revolution is ritual poem” that would invite contemplation, and the Woodland Garden was the place. Somewhat parabolic in shape, a stone bench at its vertex, and a path leads you out or in, depending on how you entered.

The landscape inspired the poetic form of the palindrome, also known as the mirror poem, a form that reads the same way forward and backwards.

The poem would be reflective, written in second person speaking to the reader and the reader speaking to the self.

I asked the Coastal Botanical Gardens for a list of the botanicals planted in the woodland garden beds and researched their spiritual and symbolic meanings. For instance, the eastern redbud “opens the channel between heart and voice,” and many of the other plant meanings kept pointing to love, and the heart as its energy center.

I was reading the signs.

During my Kundalini Yoga teacher training, we were studying the subtle body, and our teacher encouraged us to take a chakra test. My heart and root chakras were underactive. I needed to do some heart and root healing, and “ritual for revolution” is a personal and collective medicine for opening the heart to the flow of giving and receiving love.

revolution is ritual

everything emerges from intimacy with your own life

you walk between worlds

circle and circle until revolution is ritual

on which side are you misaligned?

you are the answer to be trusted

listen for the portal

plant your body like a bulb

dredge through your nervous grid

you are safe and beauty devastates

your heart is where you meet the gifts

child of earth and fire and air of university

your breath graduates you to the next breath

a wild and liberatory path longs for you—

an elder of your own narrative

when was the last time you were watered?

whose laughter shakes loose your chest?

you are held here by a sound

your name is a composite of its nuclear parts

like a tree nurtured on mutuality

you learn love by being loved and told you matter

clouds reposit their imaginations

between rupture and repair

universe is another word for all we don’t remember

between rupture and repair

clouds reposit their imaginations

you learn love by being loved and told you matter

like a tree nurtured on mutuality

your name is a composite of its nuclear parts

you are held here by a sound

whose laughter shakes loose your chest?

when was the last time you were watered?

an elder of your own narrative—

a wild and liberatory path longs for you

your breath graduates you to the next breath

child of earth and fire and air of university

your heart is where you meet the gifts

you are safe and beauty devastates

dredge through your nervous grid

plant your body like a bulb

listen for the portal

you are the answer to be trusted

on which side are you misaligned?

circle and circle until revolution is ritual

you walk between worlds

everything emerges from intimacy with your own life

Because of its self-contained nature, away from the bustle of the crowd, evokes a feeling of belonging, where something tender and vulnerable can take root and know it’s of this place.

That you belong here, and all of you are invited to be present. And that is what the song “grand evolve” engenders, written to have a mantra and lullaby effect. The lyrics are an anagrammatic, oracular arrangement of the Latin and common names of the botanicals in the woodland beds. A playful way for the plants and trees to sing to visitors words of lovingkindness and to offer an ecological way to experience and relate to yourself.

Jazmin DeRice’s vocals and cellist Robin Lane’s score achieve that feeling of expansiveness, of being held, and also of being cracked open and freed. Like your skin barrier dissolves and you don’t feel singular and alone.

I moved to central Maine two years before the pandemic for an academic position, leaving the sunshine and diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m still finding my belonging in this Pine Tree State.

I have my moments of questioning my hereness, who am I, and what is my purpose, and in those moments I hear Jazmin’s voice and Robin’s chords on the project’s “grand revolve” song:

you are here

you are safe

you are loved

you belong

look after your heart is a complete sensory experience when you include the heart salve made specifically for this project by Unfiltered Skincare. The pop-up poetry apothecary is part of this installation because I wanted to collaborate with other artists and deepen my creative relationships in Maine, and to give visitors something they could practice at home, keeping the experience alive within them.

In the Gardens’ shop, with a percentage of proceeds going to Indigo Arts Alliance, patrons can purchase a handmade pouch by textile artist Katherine Ferrier, dyed with native Maine plants that include the heart salve. Also in the pouch: a copy of “revolution is ritual” in a medicine tube, and instructions for use.

Ultimately, the ritual is you. It’s the return, the reflection, the retracing – the circles, in all their meanings and symbolism, we make that change us and and the world around us. How we tend to our individual hearts, our own warm, muscular planet in our chest, will revolutionize how love shows up in public.

View Indigo Arts Alliance video of Arisa White and the look after your heart project here.

Arisa White is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Colby College and a Cave Canem fellow. Visit https://arisawhite.com/

Arisa White confers with CMBG staff member about the site for her poem at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, winter 2025. Photo courtesy of CMBG

Arisa White contemplates heart space.

Photo: collection of the poet.

Woodland flowers bordering the look after your heart installation. Photo from Indigo Arts Alliance video (linked below).

Arisa White walks the “revolution is ritual” poem.

Photo from Indigo Arts Alliance video (linked below).

The poet inspects verse chiseled into cedar plank.

Robin Lane’s cello dissolves into sunlight filtering through woodland leaves in IAA video.

Jazmin DeRice sings “grand revolve” song.

Photo from Indigo Arts Alliance video (linked below).

A copy of “revolution is ritual” in a medicine tube is among the heart care items in a handmade pouch available from the CMBG shop

Artwork & design by Beatrix Chan