Gardens

I’m sorry I haven’t been here, I’ve been a bit stressed.

I’ve taken to walks through the woods or the hills before work in the morning, usually searching for lichens and fungi and moss and ferns, but sometimes also looking at the bigger picture — a coyote I locked eyes with, both of us in casual curiosity at a distance before a runner spooked them away …

… or staring at tall, imposing, gorgeous redwoods, growing in interconnected “fairy rings,” some old — but not as old as their coastal cousins. There are steller’s jays other days or any matter of bird. Oddly still no newts.

These are the moments where I feel disconnected from things in the good way. When I was a teen, i enjoyed lawn mowing not necessarily because of the job itself, but because of the long periods of time enraptured in my thoughts, in motion enough to narrow distraction, almost coming up with my better ideas in motion. You wouldn’t believe how many newsletter drafts I kicked off in my head before they got to they failed to get to the screen. Maybe I need a notebook along with my camera and markers and whatever else I have in my bag at that moment.

Being in motion is better than not being in motion, and the jobs where I’m happiness are those that place me in motion enough to be in my thoughts, as strange as they can be.

During the week I am not in motion. I’m at a desk. Or sometimes working in my bed. And I’m anxious and distractible. That’s where the walks come in. Or extremely sluggish, meandering hikes if you will. Why, I must ask, must we be in a rush? Can there be some trails for meanderers, runners excluded under the penalty of the public pillory, bicycles as far away as can be, simply fat and thought addled strangers like myself bumbling under logs to see if there’s a neat fungus or simple plant? The slow poke trails, for those who don’t have an endpoint in mind so much as a slow crawl to a somewhere? The worst hikes are those that strive. You miss so much. Maybe it’s my exercise ambivalence — even being alone in nature, I don’t want it to be a competition with myself that involves speed. But I’ll challenge myself to a few steep hills now and then.

But on Saturdays I have a job, a job being in motion. On Saturdays, I haul up to the Berkeley Transfer Station and pick through the garbage. No really. That’s what I do, working for a place that does salvage a little differently, sending things back to the store for sale, or scrounging scrap metal to get reused. But I find little things in the trash too. Plants — mostly succulents — abandoned by someone or other. And I simply take them home and do my best to bring them back to life.

Here’s a few weeks ago:

The numbers have grown, as has the sophistication of the operation. The exact right soil and cuttings and waterings and rooting hormones and nutrients and whatever else. I’m taking a chance on a lot of them, chances that won’t always be successful. Yet a few have begun to thrive. Two as if nothing ever happened to them, and they’re just happy as can be again. But there’s one that I root for in particular.

It’s a bit of jade, and it went from a desiccated branch, to a few cuttings, none of which thrived, save one, that looked like a stick, but grew a few roots, so it got thrown in some soil in a reused pot …

… and as you can see budded some leaves. And now it looks like this …

I like to think plants can hear us, and maybe it’s because I want it to hear how proud I am of it.

From today I am trying to regrow an abortive little succulent garden someone took on that didn’t seem to make it. Taking it back to basics where possible. Last week was some dragonfruit cacti that I took a few approaches to to see what worked best. It’s my own little garden, my indoor place to nurture something that’s not me or Slimer. A space away from my day to day, a zone to keep my hands occupied so my brain can be free.

Maybe it’s a foster home, and some of these go off into the world if they make it, since my apartment is the size of a dorm room. But I enjoy what I have here for now, one small place of purpose in a life that I struggle to find that in.