Okay, I may have mentioned a time or two how these tomatoes of mine are bruising my soul. Well, I decided rather than continuing to harbor resentment toward these innocent little seedlings (that freaking refuse to grow) to just plant them. Just put them all out there and see what happens. Eggplants too. And while I'm at it, peppers. And all these herbs. Just let nature have her way with my little orphans. So I did. Mostly.
The thing is, I may have planted a few too many tomato seeds. Which is to say, there are probably tomato farmers out there right now who have less tomato seedlings than I do. I shoved tomato seedlings into every conceivable remaining patch of my dirt garden and still have two flats left. Then I squeezed in peppers and eggplants too close to the tomatoes with the assumption some of them will surely die. Basically, I have set up a Darwinian fight to the death battle. You know, between my vegetables. Now I don’t know what to do with what I have left. I was going to give my MIL tomato plants, but when I had that idea there was an image in my mind of what said seedlings would look like and it currently does not match reality at all. Let me just lay it out there: my seedlings are embarrassing. There is just no way around it. They are these little purple things with two puny leaves which are kind of shriveled on the ends. I mean, they don’t even have the decency to be green. If they survive out there it will be a miracle. And I might have to open a tomato business. Gardening lesson learned: If everyone you speak to with any kind of gardening experience whatsoever tells you to ‘skip the seeds on that one and just buy the plants’... LISTEN TO THEM. I have nothing against bandwagons. I hitch a ride on several, regularly. For example, I am under no delusion that my new found obsession with gardening came from my enlightened brain without influence. Hardly. I remember telling my mother a few years ago that gardening was for old ladies, so I'd take it up when I met that description. Then I read Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and immediately started ordering heritage seeds. If I have my way, I’ll be raising chickens before I am through.
I read the book, I follow the advice. That is the pattern. Not my pattern, our pattern. We Americans do this regularly. It is perhaps one of our defining characteristics; our culture’s malleability. Some book or article or video footage hits the scene and before you know it we are all talking about it and obsessed and there is a full fledged trend. My only experience with ever being ahead of a movement was low carb. And I don't mean that in the same way people do when they brag about liking a band's music before anyone else. Rather, I was regarded as nuts until everyone else caught the bug and it was rather uncomfortable. I read Protein Power, by Michael and Mary Dan Eades and was convinced I found the magic weight loss bullet. I tried to convince anyone who would listen how much sense it made. By the way, if you are one of the firm renouncers who thinks low carb is total insanity, I challenge you to read one of their books and see if your mind isn’t changed just a smidge. That said I bake bread at least twice a week. I eat pasta and potatoes too. Just because I believe it, doesn’t necessarily mean I do it. And that rub brings me to the trend that got me thinking about trends today: Simplify. Elaine St. James’ Simplify Your Life kick-started that one for me and I tend to regularly get fired up about the subject. Anyone who has read about or has in any way caught whiff of the simplify/organize movement knows the first cardinal rule: Declutter. Now this is a particular problem for me, right up there with not being able to walk away from chocolate chip cookies. I tend to cling to things. Not in a sentimental or hoarding way, I can throw things out with the best of them, more in a ‘bags of stuff’ kind of way. When I was in Kindergarten my teacher had to speak to my mother about all the bags I was dragging around. I have yet to outgrow this. I keep the little compartments of my life in individual bags and because I don’t know which ones I might need in any given situation I tend to carry them all with me, especially on overnight trips. I have a knitting bag, sewing bag, reading bag, journaling/calendar/to do bag, work bag, toy bag and of course, diaper bag. I don’t yet have a camera bag and it is making me crazy. I generally throw it in with the diapers. I thought at first the reason I keep all these important things in bags is because there is no other place to put them. That’s it, I thought, I need storage solutions. But wait, didn’t my husband create just that in all of our closets when he put in extra shelves for me? Yes, he did. I’ve filled them, cleared them out and refilled them again several times over. Unfortunately, I declutter, but allow myself to reclutter regularly, hence the bags. Trends are exciting and new when you first hear about them then they slowly fizzle as people like me realize actual work is involved in making life changes. My husband and I so highly value Michael Pollan’s recommendation to “eat real food” that we have had to completely revamp the way we acquire food. We now have a new pattern to our shopping. Instead of going to the grocery store, we go to the market twice a week. We have changed the process of that part of our lives. Now it is no longer work, it is habit, and isn’t that just the answer to it all? The best of the trends should be our habits. They should be our culture, not a bandwagon. Of course, many of them used to be. You didn’t have to decide not to eat processed foods, figure out how to plant a garden, or declutter the ridiculous build-up of possessions. Go back far enough, and low carb wasn’t as outlandish as it sounds today either. Somewhere in our history as things got easier for us, living healthily got harder. Our country became rich and we became fat, anxious, depressed and bored and we’ve acquired stockpiles of stuff that doesn’t seem to help. Unfortunately, a lot of our trends are a direct result of calculated efforts from big companies to get us to spend more money: Processed over fresh, artificial over natural, disposable over reusable. It can be hard to filter through all the influences and get to the core of what real life should be like. Surely it shouldn’t be so hard to be healthy and content. Well, if I were to start a trend, I would boil down all of my favorite advice into this: Eat real food, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, nurture relationships, move your body, and live in the present. Oh, and stop buying so much stuff. My memories of Halloween as a child are not of trick or treating, but of my mother sewing. Each year she turned the kitchen table into a sewing cockpit. Front and center sat her ancient green sewing machine, a gift from my father. Fanned around her, in reaching distance, were all the bits and pieces of the project; most notably, mysterious shapes of fabric with brownish tissue paper pattern pieces pinned to the back. Invariably I hovered over her, anxious to try on my new costume. After a while, I would get bored with her concentration and the monotony of her actions and go watch t.v. Then I'd pop back in to hover during commercials, sometimes with regret as a rogue needle found its way into my sock. But no matter how late I stayed up, I didn’t get to see the finished project before heading up to bed. I would lie there and listen to the intermittent hum and rat-a-tat of the green machine until sleep took over. My mother was the kind who was breaking stray threads with her teeth while I was trying to line up for a Halloween parade. Still is, really. My sister and I have given her seven grandchildren and while we reuse most of the costumes mom has already made, she can still be found pulling at least one all nighter each fall. This is one of last year’s projects: I don’t know why I never learned to sew from her. I asked my grandmother to teach me to knit, but I never asked my mother to teach me to sew. Perhaps because by the time I outgrew wearing homemade Halloween costumes, I also wanted nothing to do with any other homemade clothing. Now that I am older and value handmade a smidge more than my materialistic teenage counterpart, I find myself coveting my mother’s skill. This past Christmas she bought me my own machine and for its maiden voyage I lugged it to her kitchen and set up my own sewing cockpit. I also took her with me for my first trip to the fabric store as a chooser rather than a bystander. After spending a ridiculous amount of time picking out fabric, I looked into the faces of my children standing with us in the cutting line and in a flash remembered what it was like to be in their shoes. It was a weird sort of kharma. That weekend at mom’s I completed my first project, a make-up brush holder. Today I made a book cover for a blank journal. So far I have learned two things about sewing: 1. It is not as easy as my mother makes it look. 2. Attractive fabric hides a multitude of sins. I can’t for the life of me figure out why I can’t make a straight line when I have a machine trying to help me do just that. But as a knitter and a potter, I am well familiar with the hours one has to put in to achieve any kind of competence with a craft. So I am going to just keep plugging away.
I have no intention of ever making Halloween costumes for my children. The holiday has a renewed magic for me and I again get to hover, only now with a lot more appreciation, if no more patience. For the record, I still have yet to stay awake to completion. I love this tradition and my children will be wearing my mother's costumes as long as she and they are willing. But one day, I do hope to achieve some level of competence so that if I have a grandson and he tells me he wants to be a duck, I can answer, like my mother, with, “No problem.” My ladies now look as though they are all captivated in a good book. Peas are officially my (current) favorite thing to grow. I'm even going to try to like eating them. At this point, though, I don't care what they taste like. Not only are they gorgeous, but they're little confidence boosters. See? I can grow something.
A close second (and third) would be potatoes and garlic. Not as exhilarating because they didn't come from seed, but still making a grand splash in an otherwise inauspicious brown garden. The onions are hanging in there in a way that has me feeling guilty. Like, they have a will to live and if I could just figure out what I'm doing wrong they would kick things into gear and thrive. So I tell them I'm working on being a better gardener, but until then, they are just going to have to figure things out on their own. A few have given up completely in disgust, but a large number of them are still considering it. Good luck little alliums, wish I could help. I've decided it is time for the tomatoes to leave the nest. I think the hubs is worried I might be jumping the gun on these needy little things so he has even taken to helping me bring the flats in and out. But if they are going to survive in the ground, I don't want us to be hauling them everywhere superfluously. I will be holding several flats back just in case, though. Basically, I'm just decreasing the number of trips I have to make up and down the steps morning and night. One might say I am sacrificing the seedlings prematurely out of laziness. And I would have no response to that. My herbs all seem to have something against me. Perhaps they've somehow discovered I mean to cook them one day. Aren't herbs the kind of thing you have children grow because they are so easy? Maybe my 5 and 6 year olds will have better luck than I. I'm wondering if everything is moving along so slowly because it still isn't quite warm. The hubs is willing it to be by opening windows and dressing the children in short sleeves, but he can be meteorologically delusional, I've found. Vague notions of chemical reactions needing heat as a catalyst are trying to poke their way into my obstinate brain. The thing is I want it to be warm enough for everything to grow. And if I were a Floridian or a Californian, it would be. Where is the justice in that, America? Recently the guru sent me some gardening quotations by Ellen Sandbeck from Eat More Dirt; perhaps to help me through these rough times of hardening off tomatoes. My favorite is, "Life is a process, not a product. Gardening is also a journey; if it is only enjoyable at its completion, what's the point?" A cold pragmatist might answer, "food". But such a person is not likely to be the life of any gathering. Because if everything we do is explained away by survival instincts, than really, what is the point? Where is the joie de vivre to be found?
Admittedly, I have been known to say that we Homo sapiens tend to elevate ourselves above the rest of the animal kingdom without strong grounds to do so. From our brutal, greedy past to our brutal, greedy present, human beings as a whole can learn a thing or two from less advanced, yet more civilized species. That said I do not want to discount completely our advanced cerebral abilities. Daniel Gilbert in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, says it is our ability to make predictions about the future that elevates our intellectual status above all other animals. That might make us smarter, but does it make us happier? Not really. The theme of his book is that we might be able to make predictions, but regarding our own happiness, we tend not to be very accurate. Making informed guesses about the future doesn't do us any good. It is all about the now. Lap it up, people, this is it. Which isn't to say working toward future goals isn't a source of happiness, of course it is. The point is, reaching that goal is probably going to be a bit anticlimactic. From the day after graduation all the way down to the day after Christmas, most of us have experienced the uncomfortable tinge of, "now what?” Countless self help guides talk about not waiting for something to happen in your life to be happy; be it graduation, marriage, reproducing, getting the kids out of the house, retirement. Putting yourself in a happiness holding pattern is akin to planning to one day enjoy a cake while eating it. For years, I've wanted to be a potter and a writer. You know what you need to do to become these things? You need to throw pottery and write. And that is it. There is no secret handshake to learn or club to join. That really is it. Now to make my living off of either of those things is another story, but to be them, I just have to do them. When I write or throw pottery, my life is no different from any other potter's or writer's. I might not be as good or as recognized, but if that were the only point I'd be living for a goal rather than enjoying the process, wouldn't I? The moment I started planting and tending seeds, I became a gardener. Whether or not a single vegetable is produced from my garden, whether I ever sell a pot or a single person reads my writing, I am these things. More importantly, I get to enjoy the process of doing them. How many people never try something because they're afraid they won't be good at it, or worse, successful? Probably the same people who can't find happiness because they are waiting for the right moment to begin looking. It's here! Right here. Now. Choose to be happy at work, washing dishes, potty training (a baby or a puppy) and you get to be happy. And it's really that simple. Maybe not easy when what you are doing to earn a living is not a process you naturally enjoy doing, but even that seemingly hopeless situation is conquerable. Sometimes it really is impossible for a person to change gears on a dime to make a living at something more in line with what she favors doing. We tried to predict what would make us happy, we were wrong, and now we have to live with the consequences. Some choose to live with them forever, which I will never understand, but living with them long enough to meet obligations and alter course is part of the reality of being a grown up. However, enjoying the process is not about being passively happy because everything you do is pleasurable. Pottery is work. So is gardening, writing, child rearing, marriage, life. It is necessary to find satisfaction and meaning within this effort. To recognize you can smile just as easily while cleaning feces as walking along the beach. It is a decision, not just a reaction. There seems to be a mass delusion that being the best at something or being recognized by our peers is the end all of life. Here I am, writing my little blog, and there are literally thousands of other people out there just like me. Not just writing blogs, but having highly similar thoughts living highly similar lives. Why is it that when we see a hive of bees we see them as an undifferentiated group, yet we despise the thought that we as people can be seen the same way? It is "the Myth of the Fingerprints" as Paul Simon put it. (Daniel Gilbert talked about this in his book as well, I really do recommend the thing!) Differentiating ourselves is not the path to happiness. How many famous people have taken their lives after having achieved just that? Happiness is found in choosing to live like our fellow animals, I think, disregarding our suspiciously auspicious ability to predict outcomes. In our toils, in our community with others, in meeting our hierarchy of needs there is happiness if we choose to recognize it. So enjoy the process, for it is life itself. |
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