Hi!
Newsletter #4.
It’s still dark outside and the household hasn’t woken up yet. I don’t have a home office or even a door where I can shut the world out and write. In lieu of that, I write when everyone in the house is asleep. I need at least 3 hours to get anything off the ground so that means staying up until 1 am or waking at 4 am. I used to write in cafes, mostly Philippes in Downtown LA, but now that option is gone and I’m at home writing at whatever twilight hour I can get my body and brain to cooperate. I usually start writing this newsletter on Friday night. Letting whatever spill out from week onto the page and then cleaning it up for the next two days for a Monday release. But life happened. So here I am starting Newsletter #4 at 5 am on Monday morning as my body fights me to sleep and my brain resists the idea that I am in fact a writer.
In workshop with Neelanjana Banerjee and the amazing BIPOC women I’m sharing space with, she pulls a tarot card from her Wild Unknown deck for all of us as writing guidance for the week. This week she pulled Death. Just look at it:
The cards don’t lie. The new piece/novel I’m working on is centered on a memory of my sister and I burying our dead pet bird in my grandparent’s backyard. I don’t know how much more appropriate this card could be at this time. Reading from the book, Story Arcana, by Caroline Donahue, Neela asked us: What needs to die for you? (I promise you her workshops are not all about hauntings and death!) When applied to writing this story, the question pertains to aspects of my writing. Am I trying to accomplish too much in this one book? Are there concepts I need to let go of? Are there plot lines that need to die? The harder questions are concepts of death applied to my own life. What needs to die in order for me to sustain the kind of life I want to live? What will I need to die for me to be happy?
When I was going through the most significant breakup of my life with the father of my kid about ten years ago, I let all of my plants die. They were inherited by a coworker, who in a fit of rage, threatened to leave the job and gave all his office plants away to a 22-year-old me. There were about ten plants which I had propagated to create more plants over the years. (Who knew I could grow shit?) After years of tumult with my kid’s father, I was finally able to ask him to leave. (Actually, I didn’t ask him. I told him.) In that time, out of distress, my plants started dying. After caring for them for six years, I just stopped watering them. They drooped and sagged, begging me to water them. And I didn’t. I just watched them die. Those plants had been with me so long. It wasn’t as if they didn’t mean anything to me, but in the process of ending that relationship, I needed to kill off quite a few things in order for any new life to emerge. I needed to start over.
This week, I took a look at my balcony where a good portion of my plants now reside and they are struggling to survive. Pandemic life has not been easy. We are not meant to live inside for months on end. The strain of parenting a teen through this crisis has been more than I can bear at times. My daughter should be enjoying her first year of high school, instead she is relegated to living in close quarters with my partner and I with very few visits from friends. What kind of deaths need to happen in order to sustain this life now? A life where we are inside because there is death outside of this house.
I stepped out onto my balcony and took attendance with my plants, a ritual I learned from poets Rocio Carlos and Rachel Kaminer. The basil was withering away. So was the mint. The impatiens looked to be on their last legs. The snap peas had dried out in sections. The rubber plant was dead. I unpotted the dead plant and recycled the old soil to the worm bin where they will do their work at making the soil usable again. It's rare that plants die in my care these days, so these few casualties feel like some sort of failure. I contemplated letting everything on the balcony die.
Without much hope that I could salvage what was already half dead, I decided to water the plants. To my surprise the next morning, they stood up again. The basil and mint were renewed. The remaining buds on the impatiens actually bloomed over the course of the day. The simplicity of plants is amazing. All you have to literally do is water them and yet that ritual of care is so difficult to maintain. In keeping them alive, I’m learning that some plants will die because they have to. Sometimes there isn’t room to care for everything--and everyone for that matter. I water what I can. I’ll reuse the soil. Make new plants. And move on. There will always be more gardens to plant and there will always be seeds.
See you next week!
~j9