Notes from July.
There are a couple of battles going on in our household at the moment. One between us and the garden, and one between me and my husband.
The weather is finally decisive, sitting at the edges of the extremes. Bright, sweaty heat, punctuated with brief but stubborn periods of rain. This has added up to a productive month for nature, which is the cause of the conflicts.
The first battle has mainly been with the monstrously huge weeds that have grown all over the place, choking everything else and exploding thousands more seeds whenever you brush past them (which is all the time, because they are everywhere). Everything feels a bit unruly, wild and overgrown (except the veg bed, which for some reason has been a complete failure this year). The verges, the pond, the borders; in some places, the undergrowth has been as tall as me, creating dappled tunnels to walk through.
The other battle, the one between me and my husband, has been about how much to let the garden go wild (in the interests of biodiversity, rather than in the interests of laziness) and how much to keep things trimmed and under control. Usually one for control inside, outside I’m all for a bit of wildness.
I think I’m especially enjoying all the productive growth at the moment because I have been feeling far from it. Sometimes I need to be outside in order to move, but this month I’ve felt the need to be outside in order to be still. All traces of restlessness have vanished, and my body does not want to move. The heat has slowed me right down and I’ve barely ventured further than the garden.
Listening to a beautiful conversation this week between two authors, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Lucy Jones, as they discussed Robin’s book about moss, it struck me that nothing in nature is growing or productive all the time. Different plants have different mechanisms for periods of rest or dormancy, but they all seem to have it. Most are dictated by the seasons. For moss, it is to do with the amount of water available (which they need in order to photosynthesise and grow). When there is no water, moss doesn’t use its energy to resist water loss as other plants do. When it senses that it is drying, the moss cells prepare to shut down and shrink. They tuck themselves away and wait. And when water returns, they restore themselves, and start growing again.
A deciduous tree will drop its leaves before the onset of winter in order to conserve the resources they have been building up over the previous months. The nutrients from the leaves are reabsorbed into the tree to be stored over winter (this process is what causes the glorious colours of autumn leaves as the chlorophyll is broken down), and the tree actively produces a hormone that causes the growth of a layer of cells between the leaf and the branch that break the bond keeping it to the branch. Leaf loss is not just caused by bad weather, it is in an active action by the trees. A tree is deeply programmed by the seasons, and it prepares and plans for seasons of rest as well as seasons of growth.
Now our lives are no longer in sync with nature and the seasons, we’ve lost those rhythms in the way we live. No longer affected by shorter days, or colder weather, have we forgotten how to take these now subtle cues from the world around us, or from our bodies? Nature recognises that we won’t always have the resources available to sustain a certain level of growth. At some point, we seem to have got disconnected from this truth.
I wonder how we can start building this kind of rhythm back into our modern lives, and respect and embrace rest in the way we do busyness and growth?
