i've always been a shy writer who moonlights as a part-time balcony gardener. i like the dirt, i just don't got the guts to truly and properly dig down, even when my soul calls out for it.
or maybe that's not right.
i got the courage to dig, i just don't always know what to do with what i find there, so end up stuffing it back into pots and hangers and other lovely, adorning things. they call it plant propagation or taking cuttings. when i first found it, i thought it was a wonderful thing.
we tend to see rebirth in view of dying things.
so the first time i found it, it was merely a means of saving what had already been lost. put an unlucky stem in water, it can begin sprouting roots, and in time, transition into a new home. i think now it may have been something to do with where i was at, in my personal life. in strange, terrible ways my past seems much more filled with loss than my present has been, and yet, i'm nowhere near where i was. once.
back in the when, i used to think this propagation business was only useful for things that were already dying. a way to save. playing god games -- though isn't the world full enough of mad tyrannts doing just that, already? i think i was trying, in my own haphazard way, trying so hard to establish some kind of order, bring sense to what surrounded me.
i thought there was something rather marvelous in taking a thing that was dying and helping it find roots to live again.
i carried on. some of my green thumb salvages did, also. others died. but that's just the way of things and people, sometimes. found somewhere the time to create a beautiful world to surround myself with, but it didn't come easy, and it hardly felt natural at first. taking care of things is just something that women do. i learned that from my grandmother. i salvaged her kitchen cactus after she died. i kept with it all the unspoken things she had given me.
in time, i healed and with it, grew more bold. i started learning about taking cuttings not as a means to evade death, but as room to grow. experiments began on orchids, because aren't they already so unknowable and difficult and wonderful, in the same beat?
i messed up several times, like humans will. are you supposed to cut above or below a budding stem? how low is low? will the plant be offended by my shears? i treated it still as a shame and hide-worthy things, my having sharpness and fangs, my hunger and my improper knowledge of nurture. still, i persevered.
i got brave, started daring more, and learned to recognize when a plant was craving space, cuttings, the interstices where new life can bloom.
it's a real act of courage, snipping off shoots for new life to exist. recognizing which parts must be relegated (or, at times, even killed) in order for new life to grow. it's not always an easy thing. neither is trusting in water.
and you gotta trust in water, in empty spaces, for new things to grow. how awkward and against human instinct is that...
i'm getting better at it. watching water. waiting for roots to sprout. trusting that things will come when there's nothing, that absence (also) serves a purpose.
yesterday, i spent a day gardening. just in my pots and my balcony, in the absence of full-blooming gardens, but still. i snipped the tallest shoot off my coffee plant, the one i've been growing lovingly for years after a friend surprised me and gifted me some gorgeous red coffee cherries, just to see what they were like.
it was an act of courage, though it might not look like it, held up against firefighters and space saviors, and other brilliant things. it was drawing resources, it needed snipping and (hopefully) repotting, so that the rest of the plant could bloom and thicken. for now, it sits as a gorgeous, watery thing.
the tradescantia not so much. don't look as good, except to me, because i'm the only one who knows it almost died a few months back, and still somehow managed to not. managed to not only survive its own death (often inevitable) and sprout new shoots. grew too big for its own boots, so i removed it, trusting in its own magic, its own resilience which only i've witnessed.
trust, also, a most courageous thing.
i find myself arriving in a new space in life, a place where growth doesn't need to emerge only out of impending death. where new things can bloom of their own accord, built on enough trust, and a jar of water. space for potentiality. the unsupposed emergence of wondrous new things.
first time posting here. much as i love my plants, i never dared see myself as a gardener. i don't, for one, have a proper garden. still, perhaps this text can find a home in this place.
