Behind the Prints
The Story Behind Rooted
Escher stairs, a lotus underground, and a cat at the center — why Rooted means patience, not a shortcut.
I fell for M.C. Escher a long time before I knew anything about design. As a kid I'd stare at those staircases for as long as anyone would let me, trying to find the seam where the geometry cheated, and eventually I stopped looking for the trick and just let the drawing be true on its own terms. That instinct is basically the whole piece. The stairs here aren't decoration; they're the argument. You climb, you turn, you climb again, and it never resolves into a clean line to the top — because that's what learning anything actually looks like from inside it. Nobody hands you the straight staircase. You take the one that folds back on itself and you keep walking anyway. Underneath all of it, holding the structure up, is a lotus. It grows out of mud, in the dark, long before it's anywhere near light. That's where "rooted" starts — not at the bloom, but at the part nobody sees, the part that just stays put and does its work underground while everything above it gets to look impressive. Then the cat, centered, lit like it's the reason the building exists — because it is. It isn't climbing anything. It's not going anywhere. It's the pull, the thing at the center of the maze that makes the maze worth walking. You don't get to it by rushing the stairs; you get to it by being the kind of person patient enough to keep taking them. "Rooted in Patience" — the line running along the bottom of this one — is a tagline of ours, but I mean it closer to an instruction here. The roots don't show while they're doing the work. The stairs don't owe you a straight answer. And whatever you're actually climbing toward was never at the bottom of the first flight.
