Reinvention Stories

Nature, Knotweed and Herbs

Now that I am living much closer to nature and am more observant of its cycles, I would say what nature does best when not interfered with or colonized by humans is reinvent. In watching this process, I too am reinvented. I observe each season as my yard, garden and the nature preserve my house borders on, constantly re-fashion themselves, evolving into different substances or forms. Some things stay the same, others go away, and fresh surprises appear.

This observing of nature and being present for the passing of my mother has changed how I think about death. Now I believe death is ultimately a reinvention. It will release my energy into the natural world and undergo a transformation into a new shape or form. This makes me think perhaps I will be good at dying because during my life I have reinvented myself many times. I won’t have to practice as others might. I imagine I am thinking more about what death might be these days because now I am 70. I think it is also because there is so much of it happening in another part of the world right now. The death of so many children. There was death in Maine last week, in this part of the world. While I am growing more comfortable with my own death, these other deaths unsettle me. I find it hard to write or concentrate in the face of them. I am overwhelmed and immobilized.

At the moment of my mother’s death, my hand resting on her chest, I could feel something leave her body, urgent but light and floaty like a breeze. I now believe she has reinvented herself as the wind. There are times now, like throughout our life together, she softly caresses my cheek or sometimes there is a sharper slap. She tousles the hair around my face, sometimes as rudely as when she used to brush the knots from it, others when she gently tucked it behind an ear. At times her great strength almost knocks me over. She is someone to be feared and reckoned with. Yet this teaches me how to keep my balance and stand on my feet. There are times, now that she is part of nature, she loves me tenderly, sometimes she is cruel.

I welcome a day where there is a gentle breeze in the air or a blustery wind, because I feel I am being paid a visit by my mother. On days there is no rustling of the leaves or circulation of the air, I feel her absence and miss her. Somehow, this conception of death gives me a feeling of being less lonely than the version I learned as a child in Catholic school. In that version, I was taught that if I am patient and good, I will someday be reunited with my mother, my father, and all the people I have loved who have died. If I am bad, someone will send me to a fiery place no one has ever seen before, and I will lose them for all eternity. My observation of nature has affected my thinking. I believe that the good and evil scenario is too simplistic and comes from fear. Fear of the fact that we will die like everything else does in nature. That no matter how much money, land or power we accrue, we will all become like the compost I put on our backfield. We will shed one form and become another.

These days I find nature a more reliable informant and problem-solver than I do institutions or man. Nature seems so better equipped to contain complexity and ambivalence than human brains can these days. Nature loves and nature is cruel. Nature gives and nature takes away. Nature heals and nature kills. As humans, we think we are better than that; we’re not. We are part of, and at times far worse than nature could ever be.

Our commitment to a sustainable lifestyle outside the city has given us the challenge of learning to co-exist respectfully and empathetically with nature. We must allow plants, insects and wildlife to do what they do with minimal interference from us. Because of this, we have had to manage co-existing with plants that are invasive and kill others, and those that support biodiversity, flourishing and growth. There are wasps that sting and honeybees that cross-pollinate, groundhogs that burrow under foundations and squirrels that help trees take root. There are bobcats that slink along the perimeter keeping in check the rabbits and mice that eat our arugula and herbs. We are struggling to learn when and how to intervene in the least intrusive and harmful ways. We are trying to learn their history, how they came to be here. What might cause them to invade. We are also reinventing, trying to find our place among them. How to respectfully and empathetically co-exist.

If I am honest, I will have to admit there are times when I want to kill these characters from nature. To obliterate them, poison them with pesticides in order to make the beetles quickly stop mutilating my precious roses, hunt the deer who are eating the strawberries I have been waiting to savor with my morning oatmeal, and use herbicide to stop the unrelenting march of Japanese knotweed. To say, get off my property, I own this now. I understand the impulse towards aggression, towards revenge. I, too, can be cruel. However, I am aware of the consequences of such responses to the stability of the larger ecosystem, including the harm it would cause to the lovely singing spring peepers if we shoot Roundup into the rhizomes of the knotweed bordering the marsh. A poisonous response to a problem that can also create a cancer in me.

I have also learned that there are many ways to address the concerns I face in my garden, those that do not create harm to other plants and wildlife. Ways that allow respectful co-existence. These are slow and tedious practices like picking beetles off the leaves of my roses one by one, every day. They take time and effort and are not a quick fix. Someone can patiently rein in knotweed through repeated cutting and when weakened, the pulling up up of roots and rhizomes. After three years, different plants like wildflowers, vines, grasses, and morning glories coexist peacefully in our backfield. The knotweed, while still there, no longer causes harm or competes for space with others.

Our back field has reinvented itself into a more equitable and peaceful habitat. What lessons can we take from nature to reinvent our human world, governments, and institutions? I suspect living so much of our lives in the digital world is making us less equipped, and we have forgotten how to live in the real one. We are distant from our bodies and have lost empathy. I know this to be true because it happened to me. I write about it in my memoir. The good news is that we can recover forgotten memories and bodies. As I am doing right now, reinvention is always possible.

This week I went to meet the woman who runs our local homeless shelter, farm-to-table food pantry and several other affiliated social service agencies. She and I discover we crossed paths before, and here we are again. We know many of the same people in the advocacy and legal community as she used to work in New York City when I did. We are of the same ilk; we are rights-based advocates, not needs-based advocates. People have a right to a home, a right to fresh, healthy and natural food, a right to safety and bodily autonomy. This stance changes the way you listen to people and how you advocate. Earlier in the day, while supporting a small local business, we met up with and had lunch with the publisher and editor of our local paper. The two women acknowledge that our little city has its share of suffering, and there are people who feel they have been wronged. They feel displaced or fear they will be, by all the newcomers and the developers that follow them.

We meet the man who runs the Farm-to-Table Food Pantry. He has connections with local farms and gets food from locals who have extra in their gardens. What he doesn’t have enough of is herbs. The people who run the Food Pantry want to give those who come something more than just fresh vegetables. Small things that are the tiniest beginning of righting a wrong. The people at the shelter and the pantry found people want more flavor, more texture in their life. They are tired of the bland diet of just surviving.

Despite the rabbits and the deer, we have been very successful at growing herbs. I have an overabundance of them drying in the root cellar below our porch. He says cilantro, parsley and basil are in high demand. We can also provide thyme, chives, and rosemary. There is lemon balm, chamomile and echinacea for those who might wish to brew a soothing tea. So, we agree to become the suppliers of herbs. Fresh during the growing season and dried during the winter months. Somehow, this tiny action in the scheme of what’s happening in the world around me allows me to write again. My body unfolds and opens like the cosmos that are still blooming this November in our backfield.

This might be the place where we can apply the lessons nature teaches about reinvention. Right here, at the local level, where real life happens. Where and when we are striving to empathetically and respectfully co-exist. Where there can be restorative practices and regenerative farms that are just. Reimagining how we might use our resources so that we may all partake of healthy food. Understanding that the differences among us create biodiversity and make-up the unique habitat of our small city. There may be some jostling of elbows to make room, we may not agree, we may feel that we have been wronged, but in this world like that of nature, we can figure out how we are all necessary, how we all play a part. All contributing to the maintenance and the flourishing of the human ecosystem, not through a post on social media but through one small action at a time in real life, with real people.