September 20, 2024
I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past month, in my quest to evolve from “person who unleashes a steady stream of words on my laptop” to “writer people actually read.” (The fact that I’ve created these categories betrays my anxiety about being a pretender, as though I don’t count as a real writer without a publication’s stamp of approval.)
If there’s one thing I know about real writers, though, it is: they write. They get up, day after day, and put words to paper, perfection be damned. It’s a discipline as much as an art. As with any beautiful thing you long to grow, there’s a part you do—showing up, making the effort, persevering—and there’s a part you don’t control. So I arise early now to practice daily, my sabbatical sleeping in a gift for summer days.
Only, in my eagerness to do my part I neglected to appraise my husband of my alarm clock plans—too early, too jarring for a marriage that must be marked by cooperation and surrender to thrive. We had to have a little chat. We met midway, but I know the sacrifice of me waking up a little later than I’d prefer isn’t as hard as his sacrifice of a loud buzzer interrupting his final hour of sleep.
I need this time, but feel guilty: if the whole point is to get words out, get words down, irrespective of what becomes of them, just a relentless practice of saying something, anything at all, whether or not it connects to a theme, releasing the shame of how bad they are, the effort to make them presentable, this sacrifice feels hard to justify. It is one thing to arise early and disturb my sleeping husband because I am crafting something of beauty to put out in the world. It is another to pursue what feels like an indulgence.
Is it worth it? A Spacious Place author Christie Purifoy talks about wrestling with that question in a way I find helpful—the way the compulsion to create requires weighing the cost. “And there is always a cost,” she cautions, which may well exceed the apparent value. “The writing of a book may cost me and my family a great deal, yet it might make only a ripple in the waters of publishing.” Choosing the costly way is a form of love, love that throws the calculations of this world on its head. It is love that says cook the meal from scratch tonight or write the blog post though only six people will read it.” (Six people if I’m lucky!) It may not always be true, but I hope that underneath all this isn’t just the self-indulgent desire to speak, but the self-emptying desire to love. This writing is my offering.
The love we witness on the cross is a love beyond calculation. If we apply the calculations of the world, it is shameful. It makes no sense. It is counter-productive. Judas made the calculations and believed he’d be better off with thirty pieces of silver. He wasn’t wrong, and he was also completely wrong.
Christie Purfoy, A Spacious Place
If there’s another thing I know about writers, it’s that they edit mercilessly, pruning beautiful live sentences in favor of the healthy organism. In an essay I’ve been working on, I’ve been stumbling on how to convey a connection between two sections, knowing in my gut they belong together, but struggling to tell the right story about how. I’ve written at least five transition paragraphs, pausing after each to read a lovely account of something that just doesn’t feel true. Out it goes, returning to scary blank space, going for a walk to let things simmer out of my conscious effort, coming back and trying again. Doing my part, letting go of what I don’t control.
It all feels like planting seeds. You understand the theory—there is a proper way to do it, a treatment that is known to maximize the chances that something will grow. Still, you can do everything right and end up without a harvest. You may even get a harvest from seeds you didn’t plant. But you are unlikely to grow anything if you don’t till the soil and tend the space, day in and day out, offering little acts of care to create a place where growth is a possibility, even if not the growth you planned for.
Sometimes I’m asked about what I’ve been growing, not metaphorically, but actually. My first response is self-deprecating: “I’m a bad gardener!” Careless, inconsistent, over-eager is more like it—I plant more than I can keep watered, and probably don’t plant it correctly in the first place. And this year’s bare fig tree, the roses that had withered to brown stumps while we were on vacation, the fruit-less tomato vines, are signs of that.
But on the upstairs deck, which I’ve largely ignored this year, there must be ten tomatillo plants, branches heavy with abundance, laden with dozens of papery balls of tomatillo fruit bobbing like Christmas ornaments, bending gracefully over the old wooden raised beds, which themselves tilt from weight they can barely contain. The branches interlace as they grow, so the plants come to form a tomatillo hedgerow, individual plants largely indistinguishable.
I didn’t plant these, not this year, not last year. Maybe at some point in the past I tucked in a tomatillo intentionally, or maybe it sprout up from the compost. The tomatoes I planted in the adjoining bed, a prime sunny spot, have hardly grown, petering out at two feet tall, withering branches with barely the energy to shoot out blossoms after the first June flowers wither in July sun. But the stubborn feral tomatillos have taken to the space. Every year some portion of the fruit fall and decompose before I can harvest them, re-seeding the bed, a new crop of plants thriving despite my general neglect and lack of skill. This year’s tomatillo hedgerow provides more tomatillos than I need. All I’ve done is pull out a few of the smaller, weaker plants, killing the live sentence for the sake of the healthy organism. That, and feed the soil.
Downstairs, a squash-like plant has emerged from my new raised flower beds, purchased to replace the old sagging wooden beds in a partially-successful bid to keep the rats from digging up my plants. The rats have come and gone here but the vine remains, and neither my untrained eyes nor AI technology can tell me exactly what fruit these proto-squash leaves might eventually shelter—butternut, it sometimes guesses, pumpkin, zucchini. Mindful of previous volunteer squash plants’ propensity for overtaking the deck in a few weeks of unrestrained growth, I arrange the long, trailing arms of the plant as carefully as I can before we depart for our August vacation, draping tendrils over the fence to let the vines climb upward. When we get back the leaves are largely withered, most vines dry and scratchy, but dangling from the hardened vines are grapefruit-sized orbs with surfaces fractured into tiny trails like mud cracks, surprise cantaloupes.
None of this flourishing was intentional, but none would have grown entirely by accident, either. My care of live plants may be inconsistent, but I dependably feed my soil, turning compost, enriching the base, piling on mulch to decompose and add more nutrients in time. I edit, remove interlopers that, like the volunteers, arose unbidden, but to my eyes offer nothing in exchange but free mulch. I provide water and access to sun. I show up, doing a part I can control, even when it isn’t perfect, doesn’t feel like enough. It’s largely invisible, but it’s the foundation of everything that grows.
All that labor isn’t enough to salvage everything I try to grow, but it creates the conditions for something beautiful to flourish. And through me, despite me, it does.
