hi all! I’m easing out of this Month of Anxiety TM and into what feels like a more grounded place. This month has looked like reckoning with my own fear, starting to sort through my belongings in preparation of packing, and completing my herbalism course. It’s a distinct moment in that it’s so focused on ending, completion, just as the world rises new again from under last year’s leaves.
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what we grow
This week, I completed the final project for my herbalism course and sent it off to be evaluated. We were encouraged to answer without our notes so I could see what I have learned over this last year as I have studied plants, formulation, and history. What started as a whim, just wanting to learn something new, has become something bigger and more central in my life and I am so grateful for it.
When I was younger, I wasn’t very interested in plants. We didn’t keep many in the house and neither of my parents were into gardening, though we did introduce the occasional flower or tomato plant to the harsh lines of our suburban garden beds. Plants seemed benign to the point of boring back then. I would much rather learn about animals than spend much time observing those still, green beings.
That changed at my grandmother’s tall house on the border of Queens. From the street, Harvard Lane is like many suburban Long Island streets with houses close together and tiny, tidy yards of green grass. But my grandmother’s treasure lay hidden behind the house, where lined with cinderblocks, in the only spot in the whole backyard that wasn’t concrete she built her garden. There was mint in profusion, strawberries, collard greens. There was no rigidity here, it was chaotic with life. At the edge, there stood (and I think still stands, though it has been a while since I’ve visited that house) a fig tree. The fruit tree in particular felt very exotic, and still does. To pull a fig, warm from the sun, and feel the way it fits right into the palm of a small hand awed me every time. The way the tree gifted us fruit in exchange for my grandmother’s care and attention.
Her garden didn’t stop in the yard, she also filled her house with plants. Some of the plants have spawned generations. I’m writing this next to a towering green friend that began as a small cutting from one of her many houseplants. (My cousin has its sibling all the way in New Jersey!) She’d take the seeds or pit of every fruit we ever ate and put them in jars of water on her windowsill. Some turned green with algae and we thought for sure she was wasting her time, but they all sprouted eventually. She started carrots this way before placing them on the ground. She made a whole new life out of something that most people throw away, over and over again. Plants became interesting when I could see them through her eyes as the living beings that they are rather than the decoration I naively thought they were.
My grandmother had the patience needed to let something grow on its own time and in its own way. She understood that sometimes you just have to have the courage to wait something out. She taught me how very daring it can be to be hopeful.
As I write this, my grandmother just received a Parkinson’s diagnosis, right as I am finishing this herbal course that I likely would not have found my way to if it wasn’t for her influence so long ago, tucked into the edges of some of my brightest childhood memories. Strangely this diagnosis is a positive thing, a way to explain some of the symptoms she has been feeling in the aftermath of a spine injury, to get treatment that may make her life easier. It is an answer to a question that she has been strong enough to keep asking even as doctors declined to answer her again and again.
Since her injury, my grandmother has not been able to live in that tall house with that garden, the closest place I have to a childhood home. With this news and her new treatment, she hopes to build her strength enough that she can live there again. I want that for her too. After years of hearing how her voice had become quiet with disappointment, I can hear hope in it again. Hope for fruit pits in old jelly jars of water on a sunny window sill, hope for warm, fresh figs tucked into open palms. Hope that something new can grow if we are just patient enough.
Assorted, rad thing(s):
A section of this newsletter where I share what I have been reading, watching, or otherwise consuming lately.
Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement, One Part at a Time by Katy Bowman: I am a big fan of Katy Bowman’s podcast but had never read her books. This book has been the biggest unexpected gift to my efforts at embodiment. It’s not a workout book and it will not patronize you with encouragement to park further from the store or other things you’ve heard a million times. Instead it focuses on alignment and simple practices that invite awareness to how you move your body through space each day. The descriptions and diagrams are simple and clear and it has brought me into more daily curiosity about my body and my routines.
Extraordinary (show, hulu): I clicked on this on a whim as part of my “Distract my Anxiety with Content” initiative of late and while the premise did not appeal to me at all, y’all this show is so fucking funny. Like actually laugh out loud funny and completely unhinged. About a world where everyone gets a superpower on their 18th birthday except our heroine, it’s full of incredible Irish and British actors. (Jen’s mother is played by Siobhán McSweeney (Sister Michael from Derry Girls) in an absolutely perfect zany role.)
Salem (show, hulu): See above distraction method. I haven’t had the focus for much reading lately and turned this on while in Chicago for work, because a dorky thing about me is that I love supernatural content. What I did not expect is that this show has SO MUCH body horror! It’s deeply upsetting from episode 1 and I still can’t stop watching it. It reframes the Salem witch trials as a plot by actual witches to punish the Puritans for their punitive and repressive behavior and beliefs. Elise Eberle as Mercy is one of the most talented and disturbing physical actors I have ever seen.
Anyone else deeply excited for April? I’ll see you then.
with love,
lisa
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