What my garden is teaching about life and writing
You will have to go back to fix some shit. This does not mean you have failed. It just means you have to go back and fix some shit. (Isn’t this the entire revision process in a nutshell?)
Last week I took on a new garden project. It took all day but look at what I did!
My wife Katia had the idea. She laid out the wood. (No pun. *giggles*) I dug shallow trenches, used a tiller, shovel, and a spade. Got on all fours to push each slab of wood into the freshly tilled ground, and packed soil under, in between and around each one. I learned as I went. Slow and steady.
I built these paths in our garden from slats of wood that remained from various projects we’ve done in and around the house. I’ve never done anything like this in my life.
This garden has taught me so many lessons that I am trying to absorb into my life, especially my writing life.
A list of lessons:
-I am often an impatient learner. Impatience makes me clumsy and irritable.
-The fastest and most efficient way to get something done is slow & steady.
-Don’t give up. Even when I’m tired and over it, I keep going and the result will always surprise me and make me smile.
-Even the tiniest thing, like a flower finally sprouting from the many wild flower seeds I’ve planted, has the the ability to make me squeal and giggle with child-like wonder. (I love this side of myself so much.)
-Whenever I’m feeling sad or frustrated, I go into my garden and everything is somehow right in the world again, if only for a few, delicious minutes.
-Keep pushing, especially when I’m feeling defeated. Just keep pushing.
-It is okay, sometimes even better, to learn as you go. This is how I learn best–by doing.
-You will have to go back to fix some shit. This does not mean you have failed. It just means you have to go back and fix some shit. (Isn’t this the entire revision process in a nutshell?)
-That slat that is a little too deep in the soil, the one that got sucked up in the mud, all these can be fixed later. Or they can be left as is. Top soil will help buttress the wood, but does it have to be perfect, Vanessa?
-There is beauty, character in the imperfect.
I posted a pic of the paths I built, sharing how accomplished I felt. Said: I’ve never done this before!
A poet I know countered: “You show us this every day. You are a path maker.” They shared a poem by Antonio Machado:
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.
Reader: I don’t often see myself in this way. For much of my life, I’ve done what I had to do to survive. I pushed limits. I tried new things. I was (still am) willing to fail. Even now, when imposter syndrome has me by the nape, I can see that it’s true: I am indeed a path maker. Still, in the day to day, I don’t see myself this way.
I am reminded of this work I’m doing of being gentle with myself, talking to myself with kindness, and finally seeing myself for who I am, with my beauty and my rot.
We all have this rot, and by rot I mean our imperfections, some of them more smelly than others. Like the fact that I can be really irritable and moody. I’m also hella generous and kind. Notice I listed the “negatives” first.
We hosted a graduation party for my daughter this past weekend. I spent weeks preparing, days cleaning, organizing and figuring out the layout of the tables and chairs, hours cooking in a hot ass kitchen & hours running around in the scorching heat. By that night, as we were cleaning up and closing down, I was so tired, I wanted to cry. I got snappy one too many times. My daughter finally grabbed me by my hand and led me to my room, said: You’ve done enough, ma. Get some rest.
In the morning we laughed about how grouchy I get when I’m exhausted (who doesn’t?) to which I said, half teasingly: I’ve learned that healing is not about being perfect but about learning to accept your imperfections.
I’ve been sitting with this tweet for days, thinking about what I learned in therapy and how I’m still carrying the lessons with me, three years after my last session with my therapist.
I have experienced numerous traumas in my life. It is a wonder I am functional and even, dare I say, thriving. I think part of the reason for that at the present moment is my garden and the work I do in the world, like my upcoming Writing the Mother Wound Intensive.
In his essay Ethics and Narrative: The Human and The Other by Chris Abani, Chris Abani writes:
“As a child growing up in post-civil war Nigeria, I had the unique opportunity to spend time working on the rice fields that my father owned. I say it was a unique opportunity because farm work, particularly the growing of rice, was considered women’s work. My father wanted us to learn everything about our culture, though, so as boys we were free to take part. I remember that as the women planted rice, they would sing mournful songs, dirges that were made up of the names of everyone in the town that had died during the civil war, as though the women could somehow seed the souls of the dead into the tender shoots of green they threaded through the mud of the rice fields. I learned the songs and sang along, threading with them, back bent. Months later, as we harvested the rice, the women would sing happy songs, and woven through them would be the names of all the babies born that year. The following planting season, we went back to the dirges. I had always assumed the songs were fixed seasonal ditties, designed to make the work easier. Later, I learned that this tradition was new and began just after the civil war, and that far from being seasonal, the songs were magical. I began to notice that the number of dead who appeared in the dirges dropped in proportion to the number of births that year. This wasn’t a simple belief in reincarnation, but the palpable and powerful transformation of sorrow and pain, and even an underlying anger and hate, into absolute redemption. These women, quietly, textually and bodily, in their way, were changing the narrative of the world.”
I am becoming more aware of (and am working on articulating) the ways that I’ve changed the narrative of my life through the work I do, the stories I write, this garden I am putting my whole heart into. It’s a daily practice I have to be deliberate and diligent about. Some days I don’t succeed. Some days the voices in my head are harder to shush. These voices that tell me I ain’t shit and I ain’t ever gonna be shit. The voices that sound so much like my mother.
As I wrote in my essay Splintered Doors:
It took me a long time to realize that my brain wasn’t functioning like a healthy brain. The realization came to me in bits and pieces, accumulating like a collage I couldn’t understand until I had the pieces in front of me. When I stare at the collage, like I do in therapy every Friday, I see how unstable my mental health has been throughout much of my life.
It took my brother’s death and my daughter’s anxiety attacks to make me realize that I needed and wanted to be well, and that I couldn’t do it alone.
My brain still tells me terrible things sometimes. This journey is ongoing. But I know this: my daughter will never have to break down a door. Yes, it is difficult to show her my wounds, but if I can leave her with anything, let it be this: we all deserve to be well.
I think about everything I’ve done to heal and manage ny mental health struggles. I finished the Splintered Doors essay on a train ride to AWP in Tampa in 2018. I had just launched my first Writing the Mother Wound class, but I had yet to fully realize the profundity of what I was doing. I would get that affirmation at the standing room only WTMW panel at AWP19.
It took longer for me to see how this was my version of what Abani writes about: “the palpable and powerful transformation of sorrow and pain, and even an underlying anger and hate, into absolute redemption.” The person I was and still am redeeming is me—the various versions of Vanessa who didn’t love herself enough to see that she deserved better, more… The Vanessa who was so wounded, so caught up in trauma that she couldn’t see past her pain to who she could be. The Vanessa who persevered.
Writing the Mother Wound is also my redemption.
It’s how I continue to save myself, over and over, and how I offer the same opportunity to others interested in writing stories and poems about (and thus transmuting) their mother wounds.
I’m offering a one-day, online Writing the Mother Wound intensive this coming Saturday, July 30th, 11am-2pm. The cost is $150. I have a few $50 need-based scholarships I’d love to grant to deserving writers. Won’t you join us?
I’d like to end this newsletter by sharing a daily practice I’ve been focused on: seeing and acknowledging beauty, at least once a day—the hummingbirds that visit the feeders and come by my deck and the garden every day to feast on the flowers, hover and stare at me; the katydids that still shock me with how well they blend into my garden. Nature is such a wonder!
These yellow hibiscus flowers that make me smile and fill my chest with joy when they bloom…
A Taino Myth:
A young Taino woman loved to venture into the rainforest. One day, she came upon a young man. They fell in love & soon discovered that their tribes were at war. He was the son of the cacique of his tribe & she was the daughter of the cacique of her tribe, so their love was forbidden. But they loved one another so they continued their affair in secret, meeting in the rainforest for clandestine trysts.
One day a member of her tribe saw them together and ran to tell her father. Enraged, the cacique arranged to have her married off the next day.
She ran into the rainforest looking for her love, to tell him what was happening. When she couldn’t find him, she prayed to the gods: If I can’t be with my love, take me.
The gods heard her plea & turned her into a hibiscus flower.
When her love got the news of the impending nuptials, he went into the forest in search of his love. When he couldn’t find her, he prayed to the gods: If I can’t be with my love, take me.
The gods heard his plea & turned him into a hummingbird.
And that is why, to this day, the hummingbird goes from hibiscus flower to hibiscus flower looking for the nectar of his love.
We humans have been creating myths to explain the wonders of our lives and the world since times immemorial. What’s your favorite myth? Why? Share in the comments section below.
Wishing you myth-making magic,
Vanessa