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dispatch 38

Mar 01, 2023

hello friends!

I’ll keep any intro short today, because I don’t have much to share. I’m working hard on my herbalism training and thinking hard on my book. I’m doing my best to create a scaffolding for my life that is supportive without being excessive or impossible. This is tricky because apparently, I am prone to extremes (gestures broadly at a black-and-white highlight reel of my eating disorder, alcoholism, the impulse-purchase rowing machine on my landing). But I’m trying on some gentleness for size right now.

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A photo of tree branches covered in small green leaves and pink and white flowers against a blue sky. — Crabapple blossoms

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I am impatient for Spring, as always happens at this time of year when a few days of early warmth change the air and bring fresh hope. It is still only February but my impatience feels warranted when I rush out the door without a jacket, only to find myself freezing one block later. Already there are purple crocuses and yellow buttercups, white snowdrops with petals gazing toward the ground, impossibly bright after a season of gray. Something has begun that won’t be stopped.

Recently, Max and I were on a call with friends who are experienced gardeners. They have the kind of backyard that I imagine I will have one day when my life is really, really together. A fantasy yard, the kind where I can see myself sitting in an Adirondack chair and drinking lemonade though I have never had a serious personal urge to do either of those things. It is a backyard for a different me, a better me, and in my brain at least, both the garden and its stewards command respect.

All of this is to say that these friends know their stuff about plants, so we knew enough to listen when they cautioned against our fervor for an early Spring. If the lilacs bud early, before the last frost, they told us, they bloom brown. The lilacs bloom brown, a shadow of what they might have been. Here in Central New York, we are serious about lilacs, and so brown lilacs are generally understood to be a tragedy. March is a kind of seasonal purgatory here, that I only just barely coast through on the promise of lilac season. I know that I’m not alone in that.

I’ve been thinking about the brown lilacs all week. Passing our own lilac bush on my daily walk with the dog I whisper “Wait. Please. Not yet”. Like so many things in nature, there is a reason for patience, a reward at its end. My timeline and my greed for Spring are selfish, they mean nothing. A good thing isn’t good if you get it before you’re ready.

Blame the only child in me but I hate waiting. I don’t give myself the space to practice when I rush from thing to thing trying to equate busyness with life. I am craving a shift towards more slowness and creativity, more spaciousness in my life but I often miss the irony of trying to task myself into slowness. Of trying to plan myself into space. I have started six new habits in the last two weeks and rather than ground me, they have made me feel stressed and inadequate. What good are morning pages if I am not writing beyond them? Why, when I decide to add a daily walk, must I also feel compelled to add daily yoga, daily meditation, and daily mobility exercises as well? Why can’t a walk just be a walk, enough on its own? I have so much trouble pairing dedication with gentleness. I make the small habits into big, unconquerable feats over and over again.

In my brain, I am always already late to my destination. I am impatient, rushing out the door with no jacket towards the things that I want: a finished book, more embodiment, my herbalist certification, deeper friendships. I do not want to be here now. I want to be over there, where I am sure things are better and all of my problems will be solved despite three and a half decades of that never being the case. I think that if I can crowd the now out of now that it will go by faster. I want to be in my garden, under my tree, lemonade in hand. And still something in the air whispers “Wait. Please. Not yet.”

I am browning the flower while it’s still in the bud. I am letting impatience keep me from the joy of uncovering along the way. There is life in this waiting. There is so much that is necessary within the wheel-spinning act of reading and re-reading my essays searching for the shape of a book. There is so much that is necessary in the taking of my little walks, in the careful practice of building slow friendships with people and with herbs. The “there” is not available if I am not here first. “There” moves constantly and patiently away from us. We will never catch it, only change its shape.

Last week, while I was worrying about and missing the lilacs, I learned that someone I love is pregnant. A whole miracle within a miracle, a new human in this blended family that we have built and will build again. There is so much beauty in this moment that I don’t dare rush it. Instead, I learn to wait, knowing that it will come in its own time, and it will be worth it.

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