New Shifts, Old Programs
Seasons, Guerrilla Gardens, Chaos, & Bikes
A little pause in the investigation, in my self-directed but systematic process of getting to know the place where I’ve landed. A pivot from the outward-facing way of finding things out, digging around, trying to gobble up knowledge as quickly as possible and instead taking a few deep breaths from right where I am. “There is also oxygen in the atmosphere which has accumulated over hundreds of millions of years,” I read from NOAA. I crack an entire carton’s-worth of eggs into the pan one by one over the course of weeks only to find that each of them had a double yolk.1 The Church of Satan tables at Pride and brings their own pygmy goat. A cooper’s hawk and an unidentified owl spar in the tree branches above us in a local park. “That’s one of the wildest bird interactions I’ve ever seen!” says the shirtless guy fishing in the lake, covered in tattoos, smoking the tail-end of a cigarette, joining us in awe. My thoughts are messy, and writing doesn’t always untangle them the way I hope it will.
There’s a seasonal shift just beginning to happen here that I want to take a quiet moment to observe and attempt to describe as a way of tuning in to it. It’s funny how we all know how inadequate the calendar is for describing this shift. We all know that September 21st is the first day of fall only in name. Depending on where you are in the northern hemisphere - and the specificity of place is so, so inextricable from what I’m talking about - you may have felt the first thrilling chilled breezes winding round your ankles or raising the hair on the back of your neck a month ago. Or the “first day of fall” feels like a sick joke made by someone who lives in Minnesota (MUST BE NICE, I used to rage to myself when I lived in Atlanta and it was still getting up into the nineties in late September, gnashing my teeth.).
Today the expected high temperature here in Bloomington is 88 degrees, but we’ve had a few of those first crisply and distinctly autumnal days scattered here and there over the last couple weeks. Leaves on some of the trees have just begun to change, even while most of them stay staunchly green. I’ve been observing a wild patch of untended ditch in my neighborhood and watching the jewelweed flowers stay bright orange for months while the tall purple ironweeds have already come and gone, blooming their deep purples and going promptly to seed. Elderberries - which seem to pop up wild all over semi-domesticated spaces here, much to my delight - are mostly done fruiting and the goldenrod is just turning the corner into its fullest, brightest expression, towering over my head and crawling with pollinators.
The other day my partner and I wandered through a new-to-us park and found a grove of paw paws with perfectly ripe fruit set in their branches. I know everybody has their own ways of thinking about this but I think it’s a bad foot to start off on to forage from a place you’re just visiting for the first time. It’s the opposite of reciprocity. It’s like walking into a stranger’s house and eating all their Cheez-Its, ripping some farts, and leaving without saying thank you or goodbye. Being in a non-extractive relationship with a place requires a bit of getting to know it before availing oneself of its fruits. It requires a little bit of asking. So I didn’t take anything edible, just a few squished plastic bottles and Monster energy drink cans people had left behind. I ate a single, deliciously squishy (”custard-y” is the way the texture is often described, which is a deal-breaker for some people) paw paw from the co-op and I think that’s going to be the extent of my paw paw consumption this season, which is great. The thing about the seasons is that they come back around, at least for now.
“Seasons give us one example of a context in which trying to separate time and space would be functionally meaningless,” Jenny Odell writes in her book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. “[T]he abstracting of time made it possible for Europeans to ‘carry the four seasons with them, superimposing them on local seasons wherever they went around the globe,’ most places did not (and do not) have four seasons. Instead, each has a series of stages corresponding to the ecological character of that specific place…no element of a season can be considered in isolation from space, time, or other components - you will find no perfect billiard balls here, only dense meshes of interrelated or overlapping processes.” Here, it’s the intense goldening of goldenrod signalling the ripeness of the paw paws (and I’ll have to ground-truth this next year, but I’ll remember).
I’ve been trying to remember to enjoy and savor even the uncomfortable moments - you only get to experience the first summer and the first fall in a new place one time. And I find myself a little unsettled not just because it’s still getting so fucking hot, but also because right now I am a gardener without a garden. I’m keenly aware, after moving house eight times in a decade, leaving behind all of the very temporary small plots that I eked a few vegetables out of - landlord after landlord selling off the houses we lived in to cash in on the housing bubble - what a privilege it was to have a growing space that I could do with whatever I liked for a few years.
Back in May I wrote a little bit about being excited to move into more collective ways of tending plants, which always seem to also be collective ways of caring for people. The sheer amount of work aside, I’m reflecting more on how lonely and isolating it was to create and grow that garden by myself. Maybe part of it was how far it felt from society - we were way out there, and the neighbors were growing soybeans and lawn not vegetable gardens. I wonder if it would feel different to have a small space but to be in closer proximity to other gardeners, maybe taking up a plot at a community garden, for example.
Community gardens trace their history in the US back to Detroit in the 1890s, when the city started funding the conversion of vacant lots into gardens amidst widespread unemployment and food scarcity. This powerful idea - that spaces of “urban decay” have the potential to become community hubs of sharing knowledge and food and social time - was taken up by the Green Guerrillas, who took gardening into their own hands in New York in the 70s, planting community gardens in abandoned lots without asking for permission. “It was a form of civil disobedience,” recalls Amos Taylor, one of its members. I love the idea of guerrilla gardening because it re-frames our ideas about what the shared (by which I mean, physically shared but not necessarily “owned”) spaces in a community should and could be for, and what we want to prioritize in our neighborhoods.
Every empty lot asks us what kind of world we want to live in.
I think about this a lot and it always moves me toward collective tending, away from planting “my own” plants in “my own” little space. I sit with something Danica Boyce wrote in her newsletter recently: “We are a culture that has forgotten how to deeply rhyme. We don’t remember the meaning of moving in tandem on a deeper, more structural level with our planet and fellow beings, the value of listening for repetition, the tender joy of apprenticeship to life. We are hell-bent on originality, and it’s costing us our belonging to the world.”
I’m still trying to figure out what that looks here, specifically. I’ve written about volunteering with the Bloomington Community Orchard, which cultivates a small orchard space, producing food that’s freely available to anyone, and I’ve since found out that there’s a huge garden program that supports the local food bank. This is the kind of gardening that I’m drawn towards, but I still feel the phantom limb feeling that there’s something I should be doing, haunting me here at home every minute. I read the essay I wrote here from last September and the haunting concentrates itself and wells up in my throat. What to do with this feeling?
For now, I’m just noticing it - not rejecting it and not hanging onto it too tightly. The noticing does a lot of work - it creates space for other possibilities to come through the hole(s) in the fabric created by this big move. And one of the things that comes through with the noticing, one of the possibilities created, is the return to earlier versions of myself, earlier identities that I once felt composed by. The version of me who lived in Illinois went through a lot of change, which I’ve written about a bunch. It felt like a lot of those pre-Illinois versions died, and that I became someone else in many ways. For example, I’d thought that I was an extrovert for most of my life, and I wanted nothing more than to be hanging out with people all of the time (drinking was also a big part of this). But in Illinois I met myself as an introvert, and I protected my solitude with a kind of devotion. And I loved it. It was a way that I showed love to myself.
But I know the dangers of entrenching myself too deeply in the belief that I am a certain way. I’m continually fascinated with the ways that I observe in myself and in other people that we are ultimately unknowable to ourselves. That we may believe with complete conviction that we will never do a certain thing or feel a certain way, and then given enough time, we find that in certain circumstances we will, and we do.
I pull the Chaos card (”Masa Confusa”) from Kim Krans’s Alchemy oracle deck, which instructs me: “Do nothing. It is destiny itself that spins the web. Clarity will emerge, one strand at a time. Your only task is to breathe; do not struggle.” And further: “Piling existential questions on top of chaos will not help your alchemical pursuits. Rather, turn to practices that clear and make space. Meditation is the remedy.” Okay, okay, okay -
One old habit that I’ve been returning to that’s been very, very joyful is biking around town. I didn’t have a car from 2008 when I moved to Portland, Oregon until 2019, the last year we lived in Atlanta, and I got around mostly by bike (although the generosity of the friends who picked me up and drove me around is remembered with extreme gratitude - you know who you are!!!). In 2019, just before we moved to Illinois, I was hit by a car while biking - the driver didn’t see me crossing a busy intersection when I had the right of way. I was very lucky - I had some gnarly bruises and other ongoing but not-too-serious issues, like my hands and feet falling asleep all the time until I got some help from a chiropractor (lucky too to have the health insurance that made that care accessible to me), but my bike was totaled and I was, understandably I think, pretty shook up.
I got a new bike with the insurance money I was paid out, but biking in Illinois never stuck for me. For one, living a ways outside of town meant it was all country roads with no shoulder around us - roads that are profoundly not meant for any non-car entity. The speed limit is 55 and hooooo boy do some of those F150s not give a shit about the 3-feet law, or the speed limit. So any time I tried to bike somewhere the soft animal of my body cowered, panicked, as I tried to hold steady on my two wheels as the big vehicles rushed past. Biking stopped feeling good or fun so I stopped doing it, and I stuck with the trusty 2013 Subaru Outback that was gifted to my partner and I by his dad when he (my partner’s dad) turned 90 and decided to quit driving.2
But Bloomington is a self-proclaimed “bike town” - home to the Little 500 made famous in the classic film Breaking Away. There are protected bike lanes and “greenways” meant for bike traffic all over town. I wanted start riding again but I was nervous. With the encouragement of my partner, we rode together to the Saturday morning farmer’s market downtown a few weeks ago and y’all, it was exhilarating to get around that way after so long. Since then I’ve been venturing out a bit on my own, trying to build my confidence back up - but it’s funny how quickly that old program kicks back in and I stop having to think about, for example, when and how to change gears going up or down a hill. My body knows what to do. It’s a far cry from the biking across Atlanta I used to do, but it still feels really good. Obviously it's easier to be a lot more hardcore when you haven't been knocked down by a minivan in the street (true both literally and figuratively!).
And biking is a great way to really feel the change of seasons, which is coming here little by little. I roll by people’s vegetable gardens with their tall fences to keep out the incorrigible deer. I slow down to spy on hugelkultur beds and islands of native wildflowers blooming. I coast by the little ditchside patch in my neighborhood and find it’s been weed-whacked to death, elderberries and all. A small tragedy, but it’s smaller when you know that something will grow there regardless, in its own season. I’ve got time to wait and see.
Thanks for reading! I love to write these newsletters, but I’m also a garden designer by trade. Fall is coming, which is my favorite time to plant perennials, so just a friendly reminder that if you live in the Midwest I have created a DIY planting guide for anyone wanting to add some low-maintenance, high-beauty native plants to their landscape, but who maybe isn’t quite sure where to start. It’s fifteen plants with eight pages packed with planning, planting, and tending information. Check it out and feel free to respond to this email if you have any questions for me.
Oomancers: what does it mean???
Do yourself a favor and read Carter Hogan’s essay on the beloved gay Subaru!!