I spent a chunk of the afternoon working in the garden, preparing for winter, since we’ve had freezes the past two nights. I didn’t quite get it all done, but I did cut back most of the roses hard, and cut back the dahlias and mulch them over so they’ll be protected and come back next year again. (I know some people take them up, but they came back this way last year and it’s what
does, so how can it be wrong?)I left one side of roses, because I was getting tired and had filled both yard waste containers. I also put up some solar lights as a make-shift path in the backyard, for walking in at night. And I plan to wood chip the area, where the dogs dig things up, and it just gets muddy in the winter, over the next couple days.
As always, working in the garden is like a moving meditation. I was thinking today how C sowed the seeds of the garden, and also, the seeds of me discovering I actually love to grow flowers too. That deadheading is as good as therapy, many days, or at least is a kind of therapy. That making bouquets with blooms you grew yourself feels radically joyous.
And if I’m also thinking about how this is the last year the garden will have been our garden, I was thinking too that being left with the garden is a beautiful thing. Some things will stay, some will go. I’m actually planning to pull up everything in this overgrown monstrosity in the backyard and start completely fresh as I return it to a lovely circle bed.
There’s a joy in both. Continuity and discovery. An appreciation for the past, and an eye toward the future, and a deep inhale in the present, always. Caretaking and reinvention. A good garden needs it all.
So does a full creative life. I’m doing a version of NaNo I’m referring to as gentle NaNo. I’ve spent the past few weeks leaning on friends and being very social, and I honestly don’t plan to stop that. The angels and devils Halloween cocktail party — which you can read about here — was the absolute best, so much fun (so much fun we forgot we made Death in the Afternoons around midnight; I blame the full moon…or the absinthe).
I’m intensely grateful to discover my life is still incredibly full. I knew it would be, but I’m discovering just how much life there is to be lived and things to be experienced and enjoyed, all over again.
So I’m not going back to a garret-like existence, but I am getting back to doing my work. I’ve been collecting research materials (the mulch of books?), because the bulk of the book I’m working on for this month takes place in a short specific historical span. But I decided to really sink back into writing during November.
I do think it’s interesting that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for the two of you who aren’t familiar!) takes place at just the time of year when the natural world is slowing down, the days when darkness drops like a theater curtain just when most people stop working, and there’s the pull to bundle up, pull out all the blankets, put on some soup. Dream of the days in spring when everything begins to grow again.
But it had never occurred to me how much sense it makes. I often finish projects at the end of the year, and maybe it’s because all that dark and quiet and slow makes room for a different kind of growth. Or maybe, for you, it’s about rest. It’s about both. A more interior kind of work.
While I haven’t actually written a word during these first two days of NaNo, yet, I have started planning and made a timeline and tomorrow I’ll start doing my plot cards, and I have the voice, and so when I dive in, I’ll be doing so from a high platform I’ve constructed, into a pool I can almost see the bottom of, instead of finding myself at the bottom in the deep end without any idea where the hell the pool is even located. That’s the hope, anyway. You just never know with a book. Either way, you have to write it.
I’ll research as I go, largely, which is what I always do, because it leads to more serendipitous connections and avoids information and choice paralysis (a novel is not a history, after all). In a lot of ways, writing a book is like doing many stages of gardening at once, seasons be damned, which may explain why it often feels so chaotic, like spinning too many plates, tossing seeds into the air and hoping some sprout. It probably also explains the desire to control the process.
But there is only the doing. In the end, it’s one word in front of the other, seeds in the ground, mulched with time, and then you have a recognizable plant to prune into something beautiful.
Happy writing, gardening, resting, being, to you all.
More soon,
Gwenda
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Beautiful!
This is lovely--thank you.