Lessons from Plants: Year-End Edition
Looking back with love at what grew + what didn't
Hi friends,
Happy last few days of the year. We are in that beautiful weird in-between where time is at once slow and there’s also a feeling of being sucked down the drain. Just ride it out peacefully, the end is very near.
Last week I held my last garden meditation of 2024. I'm grateful and proud to have offered these in a local plant nursery for two years now. I’m grateful for the Chumash and Tongva land that has held us to meditate at the amazing Merrihew's nursery. Sometimes many people joined, and sometimes just one other person. But always at least one other person, which was a wonderful reminder that me that this is needed. And you can feel lonesome, but are never truly alone.
We've meditated in pouring rain, in hot sun, in chilly marine layer, and the dark of night. Hummingbirds whiz by to join us, sometimes a bossy crow. Wafts of cigarette smoke, sounds of children and gossip. We welcome the entire landscape of the world around us as we sit and breathe with plants.
Every meditation has a unique "view," which I draw from the current season or weather, or the state of my houseplants and the planet. Wildfires. Great rains. Drought. Blooms. Dormancy. Photosynthesis. The torrents are relentless but the wisdom around us is abundant.
These meditations are a practice in and expression of biomimicry-- the idea that nature's wisdom can help us untangle our human challenges. Kaleidoscopic luminaries for the wildfires, great rains, and blooms of our lives. They are a dharma offering to slow ecology, which asks us to slow down, notice, and listen to the natural world as a reference for action and innovation.
I have tried, in as much as one can convert a felt collective experience of nature into a 2-D written piece, to share some of those dharma talks and meditations here. I also started more pointedly sharing lessons from my houseplants. I shared winter lessons in January, about doing the work to find your growth conditions (here) and lessons in Spring, about surprising growth (here). Now here we are a whole lap around the sun later (practically).
How are my plants and how is my heart now, in this solstice year-end time? And how are your plants and heart these days?
Back to last week (let us savor the immediate past as we sweep down the drain?)
Under the last full moon of the year, we sat around the fire (which I tended to in-between guidance to come back to the breath) and embodied the energy of courageous, loving gardeners putting our gardens to bed for the winter.
To prepare their gardens for winter, gardeners in seasonal climates (aka not really so much in LA) will cut back what has died but may grow back (perennials), pull out what has died and will not (annuals), and might use something like leaf litter, straw, or other detritus as a blanket to insulate the garden during its long winter’s nap.
I don’t have a yard or a house so I don’t have a literal garden, YET, but I have a life that’s a garden so I am very much a gardener and so are you.
Our lives are gardens because sometimes they’re they’re blooming, vibrant, and teeming with life. Sometimes we’re like “yeah baby!” I fucking GOT THIS. Sometimes our lives are so good that they’re award-winning and people buy tickets to tour them along with other superlative garden-lives, walking slowly through them to scribble notes for how they can get their lives to be a little bit more like them.
Our lives are gardens because sometimes they are colossal failures and things go very, very wrong either owing to our own bad choices or something outside of our control. Either way it sucks! Disease and pests sweep in, or perhaps an early or late freeze. Some things simply just aren’t “happy” and don’t root or thrive for reasons you’ll never understand.
Finally, our lives are gardens because they require e-f-f-o-r-t. Damn life can be a lot of work. No matter how fun you are there is mundanity involved and discipline required. The simple magic of consistency over time. And even so, despite all that work, our lives are gardens because how they flourish is owed only partly to you — your vision, your tenderness, your discipline, your actions — and always partly to something beyond you out of your control — the weather, the light, the mycelium, the deer, the state of the growing conditions all balled up together, life’s mysteries, another garden etc.
Now that I’ve convinced you your life is a garden… What does it mean to you to put your garden to bed for the winter? I invited practitioners to meditate on the tenderness and skill required to tuck something or someone in that you love for that period of time during which you’ll be apart.
With honesty and courage, coming face to face with what grew and what didn't. Doing the work to cut back or remove what has died, thanking it for its efforts and thanking yourself for the continuing to take chances and try new things. Leaving room for hope and the mystery that more will grow but you don’t know exactly when, how, or what it will look like.
This might mean reflecting on what feel like failures or misses, or acknowledging endings (desired or undesired). What must happen for you to let these go, rather than store them as ammunition carried into the new year to sabotage yourself again and again? Grief can come with you into the new year and into all the years, but there is a carcass that must be left behind, for certain. There’s only so much room in one’s garden, so removal allows for future blooms.
Then, your cozy, rotting leaf litter blanket. How do you resource yourself? And resource yourself with what you have and is within reach, not dream state stuff. Resource yourself now for the winter which will only get wintery-er. In the tucking in and enrobing, the softness, spaciousness, and grace that you and your life have survived another cycle of seasons.
Finally, the energy. The vibe of “going to bed” / “putting to bed.” What is the feeling of love and care when you decide to tuck it all in? A collection of care which includes wisdom and release. Blankets and pillows just right. Temperature just so. Water in reaching distance. A reminder of love and safety. Then, a letting go. It is time for winter’s night.
I invited practitioners, and so I invite you, to reflect on the grief that winter and wintering illuminate within us. Grief as a fullness, as a reminder that days were once long and hot and are now no longer.
I write to you now from the Washington state, where old growth and coniferous trees offer new lessons I am so excited to absorb. Even though this natural world has offered me lessons and comfort before, and in the darkest of times, there is always something new to glean.
I just finished Robin Wall Kimmerer's beautiful new book "The Serviceberry," a very quick and lovely read that I highly recommend. It’s about the ready and vibrant wisdom of the natural world around us, waiting to inspire us toward a view of abundance, reciprocity, and reverence for the circular. But we have to be looking out for it. Open to receiving. Meditating, in a way.
I have been slowly reflecting in the last few weeks and plan to do much more in these next few days. Looking back or reflecting is a way to start opening up to the present. As we know, cleaning out the pipes is very useful — in fact crucial — to receiving the new and the now.
A dear one’s motto for this year, which they set at around this time last year, was wide open. I love this and feel that this motto could be perennial.
As everybody knows, a day that happens to be the last day in the year is still just a day like any other day. But also, it’s not? Anyway, it’s always a great time to reflect back and to begin again, so why not now?
Only you know best how to do that. A run. A rage. A rest. A journaling. A gathering. Look to the nature around you — what can you gather from what’s happening out there to illuminate what’s happening in here?
I’ll leave you with three quick lessons from my plants rattling around my brain these days. Take them or leave them, or come back to them when you need to.
Place matters. My bathroom is magical. Every every time I have put a cactus in there, seemingly stuck in place, within weeks new paddles shoot up. This bathroom gets no direct light and not much indirect light either, by the way, but serves as a daily joy space for my son’s bath time. Magic! But it is true that place matters. You feel the differences between places that hold you, challenge you, change you, or nourish you. Take responsibility for the place that you choose to be in and why.
Be mindful not to get root bound. Some plants like to be cozy in a small pot, and others need lots of room. When they become “root bound” the limits of their space mean they begin to stymie their own growth. The roots start to choke them. You know what I mean if you’ve ever stayed too long in a place, situation, or relationship. It’s OK if you have! Root binds can be undone when the time is right. Not that most of us have also been conditioned to simply restrict our own growth for no reason at all other than to stay small. In my yoga classes, I often invite practitioners to really take up the space that their body wants and needs, and then see how that feels. I notice people need direction / invitation and also the time to do so. What does it require to un-root bind yourself and what does it mean to move to a bigger pot? Truly get the space you deserve? What next?
Letting go is always hard. When I moved from New York City a few years ago, I gave away almost all of my plans. I had close to 100, I’d guess. That was fun but also sad and hard. I had to accept that someone else was mama now and maybe this plant I’d lovingly tended to, potted and repotted, might not survive. Maybe it would do better, but almost certainly I’d never see it again. Saying goodbye to this year and everything it held is hard, if only because this collection of reality will never ever be again. Putting your garden to bed, seeing the dead body of a plant you loved, signaling the end of a growth cycle, is… hard. It requires skill, energy, heart. Hard doesn’t always mean sad or painful, but it can. Hard means a significant alchemical moment. Something changes. Letting go — even in the tiniest of ways — opens us up further to the experience of grief. So it’s brave and beautiful. It’s OK if it’s hard, keep going.
Wishing you lots of space and warmth. And love Thank you so much for being here. See you in the new year!
