Joshi & Hoffman – February 2026

Robert Hoffman and Leena Joshi traded art and words. Robert shared this image, titled “By a Body of Water,” with Leena:

In response, Leena wrote this poem:

Upon Seeing the Earth Repaired

I arrive before this earth as one approaches a familiar shore
with memory already awake.

The circle gathers the land into coherence.
Leaf presses against leaf, fibre against fibre,
each surface bearing the mark of having been held
long enough to change.

Green thickens into duration.
It carries seasons within its shade.
The eye learns to linger
because the earth itself has lingered.

Thread crosses the field with care,
a record of attention sustained beyond urgency.
What was once scattered now participates in form.
What was once torn has entered relation.

At the centre, the human figure rests within the world
as a thought rests within the mind.
The body appears assembled from lived places,
cloth recalling labour,
map recalling passage,
colour recalling the hours spent enduring.

Here, the boundary between body and ground
feels porous and precise at once.
The land receives the figure
with the same patience it extends to root and stone.
Belonging asserts itself as a fact earned over time.

I feel the sorrow embedded in this making.
Sorrow shaped by repetition.
Sorrow disciplined into care.
Every stitch carries the knowledge of what required repair,
and of how often repair arrives too late.

This earth holds grief without spectacle.
It understands loss as something that continues to breathe.
It asks the viewer to remain long enough
for responsibility to take form.

I stand before it and feel the familiar ache of recognition.
The earth has always waited for our attention
with greater patience than we deserve.
It has endured our forgetting
and still offers itself to our hands.

The circle closes without finality.
It preserves the possibility of return.
It teaches that preservation begins where desire becomes fidelity,
and fidelity accepts duration as its cost.I leave carrying a quieter weight.
The knowledge that love,
once educated by time and labour,
chooses to stay.

* * * * *

Leena shared this poem with Robert:

When the Forest Remembers You

I walked into the woods to ask a question
and the trees answered before I spoke.
They knew the shape of my restlessness,
how it pressed against my ribs like a migrating bird
testing the bars of its own hunger.

A pale-green light pooled at my feet.
It was not morning yet,
but the earth was rehearsing it.
Even the stones seemed awake,
their quiet shining like a thought forming.

I placed my hand on the bark of an old sycamore.
It felt like touching a map of another century.
Every ridge and fissure held a season
I had forgotten to live through.
The wind moved through the branches
with the confidence of something
that has never doubted its purpose.

I stayed until my pulse slowed
to match the stillness around me:
stream counting its syllables,
lichen breathing without ceremony,
the modest patience of moss.

Only then did the forest return my question,
but it was no longer mine.
It belonged to the world again,
wider, wilder, clearer.

And I understood:
we do not enter the woods for answers.

We enter to remember the language
our body once spoke
before the noise of ourselves
grew louder than the earth.

In response, Robert made this piece, titled “Path into the Woods”: