fifty-one: better drowned than duffers; if not duffers, won't drown.
I had never actually read Swallows & Amazons before this spring, which means I’d never really encountered this line, which is apparently pretty iconic? I kind of adore it: quality tautology and quality concision. And when figuring out what to make of oneself in the middle of this kind of general upheaval — well, not duffers is a good functional checksum. If we’re good at anything around here, it’s sucking less?
the harrowing adventures of ...
(You didn’t think you were going to get this far without some lyrics, did you? Ha haaaa.)
May hit the city with the full tenor and force of years pre-pandemic — which is to say, there has been far too much to do, far too little time to do it, you’re triple-scheduling yourself inevitably every weekend and blowing off 1.5 things, and I missed this so badly. It’s probably just force of habit speaking up, but I want to be a little fucked up by the full social tidal wave of spring. It’s winter so long in these parts that anything less feels like a loss of emotional water pressure.
So thus it was that in one (1) month I have been out guerrilla gardening two weekends out of three, turning some sad abandoned street corners into lovingly native-planted flower gardens; to multiple book launches (sometimes for multiple authors, a force multiplier); gave a commissioned-work poetry reading for a Flower Moon group bike ride (fun!); drank Turkish coffee in the rain with a food security friend; tiptoed into sound bowl yoga stuff (works? don’t know why? going with it?); and went on a tree walk workshop that started with woodland somatic practice things and landed in a lot of thoughts about relations, Martin Buber, markedness, and the realization that I seriously have a forest trail on the subway line, what have I been doing all this time not going to the woods like a fool? I mean, I’m exhausted. It is May. Everyone is sociable and the breeze is warm. You just drink the whole thing while you’ve got it.
One afternoon after Plant School, a few of us just ambled down to check out the rooftop garden one person’s working on, wandered along the lakeshore, stopped for dinner, and talked interlocking projects and how to build them basically all day. I think we’re going to do some stuff together. The organizing is fruitful and the plants are in. Santé.
progress on our cunning plots
Unsurprisingly, also since it’s May, a sizeable chunk of the month’s been taken up with a profusion of gardening. ‘Tis the season for putting stuff out of doors and hoping nothing or nobody just wholesale eats it. (Some things got wholesale eaten. I’m choosing to believe one of the kales in the community garden went to a hungry kale-liking person and not a rat. I can deal better with the former.)
The Socialist Plot aka Plant School garden is tiptoeing along, as we work out group dynamics and consensus on more land than we thought we’d have and legitimately not quite enough time to do the work. The program coordinator has put in for a time extension, so we can get the shit done. I’m debating my next move on that front.
We put in a decent mix of cool crops on May Day, and they’re sort of holding up? They need decidedly more attention than they’re getting. I’m debating putting forward a volunteer watering schedule, and sneaking over on Friday afternoons to deal with things before physio. Groupwork: It is what it is.
Here at home, at the Secret Plot, stuff is rolling. Here is my first tiny harvest: a few radishes I pulled to make sure the container wasn’t crowded, and then promptly ate — roots and greens — with rice noodles, spicy soy-vinegar sauce, cucumber, cilantro, and broth.
There are also birds nipping off the tops of my pea plants (fuckers!), and I’m trying to take as a compliment that for once, this garden is good enough to attract birds. While I put bird netting up. Which is doubling as temporary trellis, so porque no los dos.
At this point, the garden plan has sustained contact with the enemy. I didn’t get any chives coming up, absolutely bought two more giant containers in a fit of pique one day (no really: huge), and indulged in more than a few new seeds and a wild strawberry plant at the last local plant sale, but it’s working out for the greater good? Between the new space, the new seeds, and some light seedling barter with friends, a decent shape’s emerging. It’s starting to look less like half-formed chaos and more like something I did on purpose. When I step outside, it doesn’t smell like city; it smells green.
I started too many tomatoes this year and half of them still didn’t survive. A friend is bringing me better ones Friday; I’m sending some sweet potato slips along to Dr. My Former Roommate tomorrow afternoon. The circle of life is reestablishing.
I also finished Citizen Arborist Training (Tree School!), which ended up being an intense, interesting experience that I was so glad I got myself for my professional development-slash-birthday. Fed my heart and fed my head, and gave me oceans of both practical and metaphoric material to chew on.
Learning about the care and feeding and noticing of trees is a very worthwhile thing to do, if you have the chance locally to do it. It makes you realize that dolls are a vital technology, because we need to learn the basics of caring for things that can’t speak back before we actually ever get a life in our hands. I was sitting in the back row of a classroom, furiously notetaking a slide about soil density, oxygen, how much watering is too much, and macropores, thinking: How many seedlings have I lovingly, tenderly drowned?
This takes on dimensions in a time when I’m a person in need of help, surrounded by people in need of help: During a year when I keep being asked if I have support and community around me, and keep answering: Well, I have people, but that does not always equate to support. I think maybe many of us, for some very complex sociological reasons you can just insert here because we’re not doing that today, have access to a lot of affection that isn’t care, or care that has no understanding of our habitable climate, of our conditions, and is so anxious to help that all the water goes in no matter how much we protest, and there is no air.
One of the things I think some of us have been refashioning, privately or in small groups, is our concept of the careful handling of other living things. Even sprung from so much grief as that is, I kind of adore this. It’s a good problem: how we make our care for others bioavailable. Now that’s a question worth working.
the verbiage
Oh my god but is she writing, you ask? Not duffers, yo. :) It’s been very uneven due to other commitments and frankly, sheer unrelenting anxiety for a while (there was a week and a half where I’d go out every day and the vibes were unrelentingly, exquisitely bad, in ways like — three days in a row of shoving matches on the corner, guys? That’s not just me in a bad mood. And it was not a good recipe for thoughtful, nuanced fiction, all of that going on around me.). But the water level on several projects has been dripping steadily upward.
I did in fact find out more about the egg. (The egg is really very important.) And the complex politics of children named after conquerors, and the phrase “valences of ritual”, and how to induce an oracular state in this particular Iron Age context, which — the thing is, this is fiction, and yet it seems curiously sound to me? There’s a reason my favourite part of any project is the bit I spend saying: I dunno, I just work here bemusedly, as my backbrain does these things and stitches together stuff I didn’t even know I knew, or in some cases, didn’t actually know, and how does that even happen? But I am informed that yes, there was coincidentally enough a goddess-culture on the Ryukyu Islands right when I needed it, and centuries have to be sung to sleep like anything else so if you’re not personally doing it someone somewhere is (find them), and that apparently these are the three ways to provoke accurate prophecy. ‘kay. Good meeting?
(I downplay somewhat. I am over the moon about this.)
Nutrition for verbiage this month has included 11 seasons of Taskmaster (they’re short), which is hilarious because it’s solving puzzles toward the funniest outcome; sunshine ad infinitum; a really lovely citrusy bag of Kawa coffee, metred out on weekends; being persistently rained on in various locales (hey, works for the garden); cheapo mangoes in the traditional microseason of the mangoes being cheap; cardamom on everything; Ikue Asazaki; and the smell of the air when you can’t sleep and are out watering at 5:30 am: lake and lilacs, twined together.
Rebalancing the outer life and the inner life is an active project right now (cue more lyrics, the language of the body is indie rock) but I’m increasingly convinced there’s a flow state here; there’s a way not to add or shed things, but just arrange them just so, so they feed each other, drain into each other, form an interdependent cycle. This assumption that the life of the mind and the life of the body thieve from each other is, I have decided, fucking stupid. It’s a UX problem. Get ready for ergonomics.
things to read
The Spacing issue with my review in, of Jade Wallace’s poetry collection, is indeed on newsstands. Acquired the evidence this past weekend, and here it be.
Et bon.
There’s a lot of stuff brewing in the back here, which I will announce properly next month when it’s actually more scheduled and organized into intelligible shapes, but: the firehose shows no signs of stopping. Reports will continue. Have a good month. Eat the spring. :)