This spring and summer, instead of writing, I retreated from lit, (except for a thin online presence) and grew a garden. I was feeling tired, had a very difficult ’24 fall and winter with things going wrong on all fronts, expensive home and now auto repairs, and clients and friends blowing me off, causing hardship on all fronts. Also, my social/online community was ripped into fragments, and two of my accounts were penalized and destroyed by Meta and X. How could I publicize my book?
I had taken a pause in the fall while doing the Granta workshop and wading through a lot of problems, the loss of a family friend, and some strange family shit I can’t write about, confessional as I am. 2024 was a sucky year, it ranks among the worst, and it should have been great because my book released, and I had some writing windfalls, but…
I was trying to write memoir and felt like the universe was sabotaging my opportunity with security issues, family issues, and canceling clients with the accompanying financial troubles—the universe unleashing its players and tricksters, and me feeling helpless in all of it.
One day, in the fall, my nervous system just shut down, and I said, fuck it, I’m going to try growing a garden again, and am going to make compost for the spring and recycle things on my land to enrich my soil. Escapist, maybe, but in my typically obsessive style, it became my main focus (along with my book release) and what I most cared about in those months.
I had tried to grow one in 2019, the spring after Max died. Put hours into it and a lot of money, and in one night, the deer downed my beautiful tomatoes and practically everything (it must have been a herd). There were large, four-foot fire rings (before they were trendy), and other, smaller ones scattered around the property. I had planted memorial flowers in multiple beds around my property for Max, perennials, that were also eaten by the deer. Today, one lavender plant remains and survived my neglect (also, deer don’t like lavender).
Completely disheartened, I let everything grow over and it sat for several years until the fall of ’24 when I decided to give it another shot. I bought some wire fencing used to make animal-proof cages, some posts, and hauled piles of grass and leaves which I meticulously chopped for organic compost. I added worm castings and other compost to the beds, which I, by then knew, had terrible soil (a bad online purchase dumped on my property). I raked, blew and chopped endless bags of leaves and covered the beds, which proved to be beneficial over the winter. I planted some bulbs, potatoes, and garlic for over winter, which turned out to be, mostly a failure, due to poor timing, bad soil, or bad luck.
I needed something to look forward to. Something that had nothing to do with humans judging, accepting, or rejecting me, either in literature or in my real life. Something that was mine and mine only. Something no one else, save for the weather gods and the beasts, could undo. I needed some hope when I had none. And know my lack of hope wasn’t due to organic depression or misfiring, it was because I was getting hit with a barrage of shit and bad luck. So much, it was hard to take, and this gone-hope, while exasperated by my personal “unluck,” seemed to be also part of something collective, given world events and the election, all hitting hard in a dark synchronicity.
For as much value as there is to be present, in the moment, what the gurus say, I find that hope is grounded in a future, in plans, and in possibilities, but also in the way we can openly greet the unknown… And we need hope to thrive, to even get through each day, and we need it for trusting the power of attention, intention, and all of the benefits of mindfulness. I can’t control who is in office, fascism, the publishing world, who buys my book, who parented me, who loves me and who doesn’t, but I can sync myself with nature and feel the powerful sense of belonging that comes with that, which, in my active, sweating, laborious meditation as I am working the earth, listening to the plants, and observing the magic order of nature, feels greater than all the inequities and injustices I have been, and continue to be pained by, like so many other millions of people… If I could only do this, garden, nothing else, I would be happy all the time.
Max, who is now gone, started gardening the year she suicided. She rented an allotment and built some beds. The day, she left this world, we were supposed to build beds with a bunch of timber I bought… She had put endless hours into the lot, digging by hand, moving pavers. Max was also obsessive, and tended to throw her entire soul into whatever the current obsession was.
She wanted to worm compost, in part, because it could be done in a small space. Assured me that was the best way. I knew nothing of it without her mentioning it, but I have taken her advice, which is only one small way in which she lives on. It’s not as macabre as it sounds. I acquired a multi-level worm hotel from Facebook Marketplace for cheap and acquired some red wiggler worms. Learning to care for them.
There’s a learning curve to any composting, and it has really been just this spring and summer where I learned to hot compost outdoors, and also worked out the ratio of food/water/bedding/etc. I admit there is still something that gives me the willies about worms, but I have a wee bit of something nurturing in me, and I liked having something to take care of, or a worm someone. What I didn’t know was that somehow gardening and learning composting, all the kinds, and DOING IT, would help me somehow better accept death and the painful comings and goings of people in life.
I was once a caregiver for someone I adored. I am not a caregiver type, however, as much as partners and others have wanted to make me so. I’m weird. Withdrawn. I don’t like schedules that aren’t of my own making. But somehow, this year, I tuned into the needs of plants. Each day in the morning, I feel a kind of hope. The first thing I do is head out to the plant beds and see what is blooming, admire the bees pollinating, and watch the butterflies and wildlife, all doing what they were intended, or just what they know. There’s a sense of not knowing what will come next, how big it will be, how green and what shade, and, of course, how long it will be here.
I deliberately overcrowded things, so some of the beds look like mini forests. In the beginning, they were lush and green. I ignored what the seed packets said about spacing (which are really geared toward commercial farming) and let the plants touch each other. The tomato forest with one-foot spacing I chose not to prune did the best. Tomato plants are social. They like to touch each other and other plants. They like their basil and hot pepper friends. I am letting them live their full lives by not pruning them to death, and they are still giving me something, food on my table.
One bed, I did properly prune and mulched and spaced more widely. It performed poorly by comparison, until I moved six sizeable container tomato plants into the tent with them. Then they all went crazy, their “arms” grew and entwined, and they started blooming and producing fruit. It was amazing. I’m pretty sure I would get way more fruit if I pruned the hell out of them, but here’s the thing, I think they are happy and thriving in their overgrown, tangling green state, and that was as important to me as food.
Next year, I may experiment more, along with building a long track for them. But to imagine a plant possessing its own joy, that a plant has a consciousness, is part of my spiritual growth. Did you know plants/forests/ecosystems have mycorrhizal networks that extend for miles and allow plants to communicate and even transport nutrients to one another? In return, plants give the fungi sugars and carbs. So plants have a collective consciousness too, and to foster this on my property, even on a very small scale has made me hopeful, but also, I gradually realized that I was part of this magical thing, these processes that are what nature intended in a world being destroyed by industry and greed. By opting out of certain things, I was opting into something life changing, potentially self-sustaining, and moral. And, I have to add, spiritual. A lot of it was paying attention and listening to what the plants have to say, how they live in the world.
This year it was cobbling things together to hold up plants, protect them from wildlife, and have some food for me, not just the creatures. But it has been amazing and transformational. I made most meals from scratch once the garden started blooming and had fresh salads for weeks with fistfuls of herbs. Cucumbers haven’t tasted this good in years, nor tomatoes. It has made me realize even the organic food I bought at stores in crappy.
And now it’s September (I started writing this in August), and my community, did, in fact show up, despite the ways we became scattered, as did many other folks to promote, interview, and review my book. I am, indeed extremely blessed and humbled for all of the support I received. At the end of July, the book was named a Lammy finalist, and, this fall, I placed third in a writing contest, all wonderful things, and yet the wind has again shifted, and life has thrown some shit my way and some devastating blow to Americans as we watch helpless. NEA grants were canceled (can these be an unrealized freedom?), an influential/harmful person was assassinated and people want to re-frame his life to suit their agendas as our first amendment rights are being stripped away (and this is only a bit of it), and then there is Gaza/Israel… Devastating, and so much suffering with no end in sight…
So here we are again, it’s fall, and how to find hope in these existential/surreal times… To turn on the news, go on social, or where I live, leave one’s home feels like submitting to gaslighting. It is sometimes too much to hold.
But I occupy myself with tasks, chopping the sad dying plants, the once-green cucumber leaves and dark-spotted basil, all for compost while preparing several new beds for next year with finished compost I made and some improvised hugelkultur from the mess the tree trimmers left in spring. Preparing piles of dead wood for chopping. Filling tin-can ovens with wood chips for making bio-char and looking forward to the burning and renewal of the soil next year, as I wonder about the larger burning and where we are headed as a country and a world. Hope in uncertainty is a task of the tallest order. What are you doing for hope these days? Does it involve color or language, a calendar or a candle? A tree, a song, or a soft hug from someone you love?
I wish I had more answers, but sometimes hope is just a lot of work, as is happiness. Maybe we can hope that from all of this violence, disruptive politics and burning that we will find some fertility in the ash and that a new order will emerge up the road. It is the age of Aquarius after all, meaning change, the transformational kind… Let’s imagine a world in which people behave like mycorrhizal networks, rushing to help those in need. I see it in my small lit community. Thank you for the support and for fostering possibilities—one of hope’s more elusive qualities—from the bottom of my heart. And thank you for stopping by.
