Tag: gardening

On Dirt and Clay and Flux

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a cold spring here so far, though things are starting to budge. Until recently, the daffodils surged about three inches above the soil and then stayed put. Usually, I’d see their lolling yellow blossoms by now, at least at the old house. It’s my first spring here and aside from the bulbs I planted in front of the house in the fall, everything else that might come up in the sandy soil in my new yard is a mystery.

I’m a haphazard gardener. I like to plant, and to nurture, and I love to be surrounded by flowers, but I’m not the most attentive in terms of what plants thrive where. I don’t want to drown in data, but I could be paying closer attention, and maybe with this yard, I finally will, instead of just plopping into the dirt whatever was on sale at the nursery, or whatever colorful bloom caught my eye. But it is also very likely that I will plant something that was on sale, in what I hope is a good spot, and cross my fingers.

At the old house, I prided myself for taming the overgrown yard I inherited when I moved in. In bringing back what had gone neglected. Here, there is much to do too, though I am pleased what is already on the property, a mature rhododendron, a forsythia deep in the back yard, the irises and hostas.

My gardening efforts represent slow processes of growth and discovery and labor. Moving into a new place, waiting to see what will bloom, deciding what to do next, then planting, but also pruning, tending, and doggedly removing invasive species that tend to take over neglected spaces. Already I’ve been yanking out the strangulating vines of an old honeysuckle. I go outside to play with the dog but suddenly my hands are in the dirt.

Photo by manu prasad on Pexels.com

The slow rhythm of gardening appeals to me, and it’s similar to what I enjoy about pottery. There are many long steps in each process in ceramics, so many techniques to learn, skills to master. Sometimes I think all I can hope for is mild proficiency, not mastery, but I am pleased to be producing functional forms whose shapes and colors are appealing and often delightful. I’ve described pottery as a hobby but it’s really more of a practice. Like writing, it is something I need to do. Making something that is both artful and useful nourishes me, whether it’s a blog post, a poem, a story, a mug, a bowl. These all can be shared, held, used to connect. The haphazard gardening I do is a little different; the need is there but what I’m producing is more amorphous. I want my space to be both safe and pleasing, and the process is long and grubby (and in this way is much like pottery).

In all these things I find the slowness of the processes appealing and soothing; they complement another task I’ve been tackling. I feel like inside me are all these crumpled pieces of paper and I’m trying to find them and smooth them out and understand if what is written there is a riddle or a love note to myself or some secret key to understanding myself or life in general better. Maybe that’s why I’m often at peace in being alone these days, despite the periodic loneliness I wrote about in my last post. Deciphering myself for my own growth is one thing; doing that while interpreting myself for someone else is quite another. I guess that’s what everyone wants, in some fashion. To be known. Just to be known without translation or explanation.

The slowness I seem to be cultivating brings me the opportunity to understand. I try to remember who I was as a child, what delighted me, what made me laugh, what made me cry. I wonder when I began to feel the pressure to fit in, to behave differently, and why it was so hard. I recall that while fitting it in often eluded me, I could achieve a semblance of acceptance by being accommodating, by trying to be less intense, less sensitive, by hiding those things. Looking back, it is easy to see the ways in which whenever I slipped up, conflict brewed, or some other negative reaction surfaced. Now, I love laughing in the kitchen all alone with my dog at something one of us did, talking to myself, delighting in the moon, in my own kite-hearted joy every time I see the lake. I talk to the tree in the yard and make up silly songs. I have stretches of seemingly unsourced sadness that lingers until it has run its course, and then it dissipates. I allow it. I allow myself all the weird and plain and quirky and sensitive and everyday things about me to flourish, things that over the years one or another person has mocked or announced as strange or made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed about.

I am making up for lost time. I am making up for hiding from myself. I am making it up as I go along, how to live now, how to live well on my own terms. And, yes, it’s sometimes hard and sometimes lonely but it is a relief also to not be laughed at for my quirks and my foibles, to not be misunderstood or quieted or subdued by someone who found things easier if I carried myself through the world differently. I want to be around people who recognize my joy and want to share in it, or who see my periodic melancholy without assigning to it sources or blame; it’s just mine, and it will pass. Like anyone, I want to be accepted, respected. I don’t always expect to be understood, especially as I am still learning to understand myself. But it is always a relief when that happens.

I’m perpetually perplexed by people who seem to have themselves all figured out. Perhaps no one does but people carry themselves as if they do. Or maybe it’s not something most people think about. It has become plain to me over the years that the things that often trip me up offer no such obstacles to some other folks. I’ve been teased for being physically clumsy but I think that’s wrapped up in some other, internal clumsiness as well. Maybe that’s too pejorative of a term. There are things I want to make sense, but they never seem to, and they are hard to ignore. It could be something about a past event or a current situation, or something more, but I hate it when I can’t untangle it. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been called an overthinker.

I wonder what the trick is, to be confident in the midst of feeling that everything is in flux, in a state of change, or still being assessed, figured out. In pottery, there’s a type of glaze called a flux and it’s used in conjunction with other glazes. Its components work to bring about movement in the other glazes it is layered with. It’s gorgeous and tricky and fun. Maybe the secret to that confidence I envy in others is seeing the flux of life, of the own innerworkings of my head and heart, as gorgeous and tricky and fun, instead of an unsettled, clumsy thing that I won’t feel comfortable with until it is figured out.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept some ambiguities that used to cause a lot of discomfort. I’m okay with not knowing how a piece of pottery will turn out; I’ve even grown to be okay with things not turning out well at all. But in life the stakes are higher than clay. We are often in situations for years before we’re aware of whether or not they are “turning out okay.” And typically, it is only after some time has passed can we evaluate what “okay” even meant in any situation.

I think one of the hardest things to do is find the peace within a moment when the larger situation is quite flux-y. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to things that urge me to slow down, to ponder the incremental inching of the daffodil stalk, to stare at the lake endlessly and simply hear it and watch the waves undulate, to nurture a lump of clay through all the steps that turn it into the vessel I sip coffee from. If I can stretch out a moment, I can find reprieve from the churning of my brain and its efforts to figure it all out. But what I want to work toward is being able to hold it all, hold the slow, stretched out moment not as escape from the churn and flux but as part of it. I want to feel how it’s all connected, but maybe getting there is a slow, clumsy process too. And maybe I’ll finally accept that there are things that will never make sense, aren’t supposed to make sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something to teach us.

Love, Cath

On Want, Work, and Growth

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we will try many ways of looking before we can see.

Sometimes when we want something very badly, we will look at it from every angle, multiple times, even creating angles that are not there. Hope can do that – create prisms out of thin air. Shiny things that distract our minds and hearts from difficult truths. But at some point, the blinding brightness of the light is muted by a cloud – of anger, of fear, of sadness – and we are able to see things with a new clarity, and then, to move in the direction we need to go.

I told my sister recently that I’ve been gardening as if my life depended on it, and I wondered if it really did, in a way. Not the fact of my life itself, but the way I want it to unfold. I told her that when there is so much to do, you can hardly even tell I’ve done anything. A lot of the hard work we do can be like that. We wonder and worry about how our efforts will be perceived, though we know how we’ve endeavored.

When we say we want something “very badly” we mean this: we want it very much. Sometimes we are told that what we want is a bad thing to want. It is silly, it is pointless, it is too much, it is ill-defined, you won’t get it, the world doesn’t work that way, who do you think you are, to want such a thing? No one gets what they want. As if wanting the right thing for ourselves and our future is somehow the wrong thing to do. I suppose sometimes it is. I suppose, in some philosophies, the teaching is to eliminate wants, the way some people eliminate carbs. They are bad for us. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe we are all wired differently. Sometimes we simply must respect the differences.

We offer trellises to vines, thinking of future growth. There is planting and wanting and planning everywhere. There is growth in new directions. We are many things at once: the vine, the trellis, and the gardener who plants the vine and places the trellis. We are who we’ve been and who we want to be, as much as we are who we are in this moment. Multitudes, always.

My gardening has involved creating beds and pathways out of an overgrown, weedy, neglected area behind my garage. It was long abandoned when I arrived in this place, about a year ago, and for many reasons, I was not able to make it a top priority. Now, with more time available and some fraught and frenetic energy on hand, I got to it. Digging, planting, creating. It isn’t finished. Like everything good, it is a work-in-progress, something to always tend.

We need the work and the work needs us.

I planted a little baby of an Eastern white pine. I’d been longing to plant a pine tree for a while. I researched them. Realized many of the specimens I thought were pine trees were really spruces. Things often reveal themselves to be something other than what you thought they were.

I looked for trees months ago, but it was too early and none of the gardening or landscape stores had them yet. Then I looked too late, I thought, because I still was not finding what I was looking for. But yesterday, I found the white pine. I greeted this creature, as if knowing it already. There you are, hiding here in the back at this store I never come to. So, there’s hope I guess, buried in gardening metaphors, about timing and finding, maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to see clearly sometimes. Remember?

My current state of mind is work- and growth-focused. Writing and gardening. Dig, prune. Wait for rain. Be patient. Blossom? Maybe. Sometimes it works out that way.

Love, Cath