Saying Hellos
Hi from the L1M1NAL space
Hey from Indiana, y’all! Hey from the in-between, hey from my little office full of half-unpacked boxes, hey from not knowing which way is up or where anything is, hey from this new window view where I can admire the neighbor’s two sycamore trees across the street. Since I wrote you last time each day has felt about a decade long, filled with so much happening that it couldn’t possibly be contained by one single 24-hour period. Can you believe we brought the U-Haul full of stuff out just a week ago? my partner and I keep saying to each other, in some variation. Illinois feels like it might have been a five year-long fever dream.
I’m historically terrible with transitions. When the bottom falls out the first thing I think is, fuck it - let’s drive this baby into the center of the earth. ‘This baby’ being, of course, my life and sanity. All bets are off. Sometimes I gotta reach the outer limit of what I can tolerate in order to come back towards center again. And when the routine is out of whack because there is no routine, it feels like just about anything could happen. Since I got here I’ve already come thisclose to applying to go back to grad school - IU has a Master’s in Folklore and Ethnomusicology that looks rad - but then I remembered the last time grad school destroyed my relationship to something that I loved (I’m looking at you, poetry school!) and restrained myself. They aren’t at all clear to me yet but I know that new routines will arise from new material conditions.
This move was a little different from moves past in a surprisingly positive way. I think perhaps I front-loaded the suffering, I overcompensated for how bad I thought I was going to feel after we moved. Or it’s just that every minute of staying in the place I was about to leave behind forever was worse than the actual leaving itself. Maybe I’m still running on so much chaos adrenaline that I haven’t been able to feel the full impact yet. But the primary feeling I have - which I did not at all expect to have - is relief. The other side of the sadness of the sentence, “It’s not ours anymore” is the relief of the sentence, “It’s not ours anymore.”
In their last newsletter Cody Cook-Parrott wrote, “This is not an obsessive grief it is simply the way the heart opens like a creaky window in an old farmhouse. To let in the wind of what was, to let go of what could be is in the practice of my solitude.” Yes, yes, exactly that.
The hellos are easier than the goodbyes. One thing I noticed this time around with moving is how effective of a grounding practice it is to just look at a plant whose name I know. Maple. Oak. Butterflyweed. There you are. Hello, hello, hello. I’m happy to see you and the way the breeze ruffles your leaves here.
I keep thinking about something Tyson Yunkaporta wrote in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar from Australia, and he explains how the colonizer way of relating to a new place often goes: Direct, Reflect, Connect, Respect - with white people coming to respect the Aboriginal communities they are administering to only as the last step of the process (usually after trying to figure out why their new “directive” mandates or programs aren’t working in those communities). Whereas, according to him, an Indigenous process of getting to know a place, a people, is the exact opposite: Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct.
The first step of Respect is aligned with values and protocols of introduction, setting rules and boundaries. This is the work of your spirit, your gut. The second step, Connect, is about establishing strong relationships and routines of exchange that are equal for all involved. Your way of being is your way of relating, because all things only exist in relationship to other things. This is the work of your heart. The third step, Reflect, is about thinking as part of the group and collectively establishing a shared body of knowledge to inform what you will do. This is the work of the head. The final step, Direct, is about acting on shared knowledge in ways that are negotiated by all. This is the work of the hands.”
This is the framework I am trying to keep in mind as I meet people and places here. I am going to try to remember that each of these steps takes a long time, and to be very, very patient. Relationships take time, no matter if it’s with a grove of trees or human neighbors. I do not need to rush, I can let life unfold as it will without needing to push, I can take it all in deeply, I can trust that little by little things do change and feelings do pass. One of the guidelines I learned in my permaculture design certification course back in Atlanta (problems with this model are noted!) is to try to avoid implementing any big design decisions before you have seen the site through at least one round of all of the seasons. Isn’t that infuriating?? Instead of jumping right in and planting new trees or moving earth or doing anything even semi-permanent, just wait. Wait and pay attention in the meantime.
When I first moved to Illinois from Atlanta I will admit - although I’m not proud of it - that I felt like people should automatically want to be my friend, incorporating me into their circle of closest bosom buddies immediately, because I had come from a big city and had done a lot of things that I thought made me an interesting, fun person (many of them related to my penchant for creative methods of binge drinking). But let me tell you that it extremely did not work out that way, and that was a very humbling experience for me (although in the end I was lucky to leave Illinois with some incredible friendships that I am very grateful for). And planting trees in Illinois was humbling too - I think I certainly would have made different design decisions if I had waited a full year. So it’s not my first rodeo, by which I mean I am not going to make the same mistakes again. Respect, Connect, Reflect, Direct, and never the other way around.
Sophie Strand wrote in a newsletter recently, “The only thing I am certain of right now is that I am constituted by a generous uncertainty. An uncertainty that gestates miracles I could never have expected or authored. I am certain that I am not the most reliable narrator. I have found that the space I hold for being wrong acts like a freshly mulched garden. Relationships sprout there, in the connective tissue between opposing ideas, that would never have grown in the relationally sterile bounds of a well-defended belief.” In the new-to-me downtown here I park behind a car with the license plate that reads L1M1NAL and I think well, I guess I’m in the right place.
Lovely words, great ideas, but what does it actually look like in practice? For me right now, in the house-chaos of moving and trying to set up a domestic interior, it is starting with the small act of noticing what is immediately around me. The sycamores across the street through the window. The mulberry residue melted onto the shortcut through the woods on the way to the grocery store. The big, velvety brown boletes that flop around the yard like thick flapjacks. The tiny baby bunny hiding behind the recycling bin. The hawk that flew over us and landed on the roof rack of the next-door neighbor’s car on the first day, an auspicious omen, we decided.
It is funny how the shrinking of natural space that’s within my purview the nature vs. built environment doesn’t feel claustrophobic like I thought it might, it just feels like those two types of environment are closer together, more enmeshed. It is always an illusion that humans are separate from the natural world - one that is vigorously defended by the way civilization is imagined and constructed. But here, deer wander casually through the yards, birds I’ve never met before chirp from high up in the trees. And while I feel the loss of my wascally yard wabbits, my aggressive cardinal always trying to fight its reflection in the dining room window, my milkweed popping up all over the yard, it is also enlivening to see these beings that I’m familiar with - cousins of the ones who lived on the land I stewarded. How to expand the limit of the beings that I feel a kinship, or at least a familiarity, with and still hold the boundary of Self? How to define that space between self and other so I’m not codependently pouring myself into a new landscape thinking ‘this will make me whole, this for sure will make me whole’?
That’s a question from the in-between, to which I joyfully say: I don’t know! I have no idea, and there’s only one way to find out. I can feel the neural pathways in my brain making new shapes, new grooves of recognition, shallow at first. It takes forever to find anything in the grocery store here but they play all the songs that I know how to sing along to, so I do.
I’m putting this at the end because I’m afraid that y’all might be sick of hearing about how sad I was leaving my trees in Illinois! So let’s call it an optional bonus if you feel like reading it:
The last day at our house in Illinois I was doing some final garden chores - adding some mulch to the younger shrubs, zhuzhing the garden beds, staking the unruly five foot-tall asparagus plants - mostly trying to make the design and the structure of the growing spaces more visible to someone who isn’t me and who presumably can’t read my mind. The hand-drawn plant maps and typed yard manual together clocked in at over twenty pages for the new owners, so hopefully that’s enough so they at least know what they’re working with. My biggest fear is that they’re going to cut down all the wild plums and hazelnuts and serviceberries and all the other food forest plants I planted and bring it back to lawn. The trees are people to me, they were some of my closest relationships in Illinois and I can’t text them to tell them I miss them. So my hope is that maybe they’ll keep at least some of them if I can just explain what they are and why they’re special. Who knows if it’ll work, but I have a secondary back-up plan now that came to literal fruition unexpectedly.
On that last day while finishing those final chores, the last love letter to my plants, I was shocked to see that the plums were ripe on the smallest wild plum tree, the one furthest from the house. Truly, I thought I would never see the fruit on these trees ripen before we left and for it to happen on the very last day felt…so intensely significant to me. It felt like the tree saying goodbye, maybe even saying thank you. I do not remember the last time I ugly-cried like that, doubled-over on the ground sobbing hysterically. I let my tears drip onto the ground, into the mulch and the soil below it, I wiped my face (gently) with the leaves. It is something I have never felt - to tend something whose fruit you fully believe you will never see and then to see it. I’ve written before about how planting trees is a radical act of believing in the future, no matter how precarious that future feels, and this felt like the gift of that future.
Three ripe wild plums in my hand, three ripe wild plums in the last unpacked plate on the floor of my empty office, shared by my partner and I as we sat on the floor with the stressed-out cat. Front-loaded with intense sweetness, followed by the sharp astringence of the skin that many wild fruits have (although not anywhere as sharp as a persimmon! IYKYK). The flavor of the fruit itself summed it all up - what more could there be to say?
Anyway, I saved the seeds, that’s the secondary back-up plan. I put the plum pits in a ziploc bag of wet sand in the cooler and into the fridge in the new place in Indiana. Hopefully they’ll stay dormant there until I can plant them in pots in the spring. It makes me think of what Hiromi Ito wrote about plants, that even when they die they’re not really dead. I don’t know when but I know there’s an unruly hedge of wild plum trees in my future somewhere.
Hey, thanks for reading, as always. See ya next time.
“Front-loading the suffering” has entered my lexicon. Really lovely Mere. Wishing you the best in your new endeavors xo
This is beautiful. I don’t think I ever could tire of hearing you talk about your tree grief, though I do hope your new spaces bring their own balance of joy so you don’t have to hold the grief only. It sounds like you are in patient wait for that, to learn how to be in relationship with the new environment and how to love it, and you, kindly there.
The plum pits made me think of Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, which is what I’m reading now, where he talks extensively about gardening as a kind of community ethos, and his hope of transplanting a fig tree from a treasured person’s yard. The read feels like it’s up your alley if you haven’t read it yet.