On Seeds

Fostering growth in the shallows of late stage capitalism

I wrote this next essay, On Seeds, late in the Spring of this year. What begins as a conversation about IVF, a topic that may seem quite specific and singular, quickly unfurls into something much broader and relevant to our conversations here at Creativity in the Time of Capitalism. This piece is a meditation on creating environments and circumstances that foster growth. It considers how we might begin to recover the agency to do so in a context that is all too happy with our having forgotten. 

---

It started in the early days of IVF when, during my stimulation cycles, I would visualize my ovaries as pomegranates, bursting with seeds. This lens of magical realism allowed me to imagine my body as this undeniably fertile system. Finding this symmetry with the natural world permitted me to see the possibility of growth in my own body as inevitable, despite experience demonstrating otherwise. 

I approached my fertility with a lot of entitlement after a lifetime of indoctrination that pregnancy from sex was inevitable and absolute. It’s been two and half years of IVF now, following a year of trying “naturally.” Even though my fertility clinic would have me believe that this path would be a relatively straightforward one, a notion reinforced by my own privileged thinking, I learned through six grueling cycles that this was not an on-demand system. There was a lot of what felt like failure. And after that first year of medical intervention, our second year of trying, it became clear to me that if I was to keep going, there would need to be some much larger changes and a broader acknowledgement of the difficult path I was subjecting myself to. What I needed was a supportive approach operating in chorus, not just hastily pulling the lever of my fertility like so many Veruca Salts wanting their golden eggs. 

For starters, I was a workaholic. I had been running my own business (my third) for the better part of a decade and was mired in low-self worth, despite the external veneer of success. Weaned on scarcity, settling for less than I deserved, less than I needed, less than the situation called for, was second nature. I had been operating at a feverish clip for years as a result. There was always this sense that whatever I had would soon be taken away, and whatever I wanted, if not seized immediately, would be lost to me forever. I felt numb and empty inside. I was doing so little to foster and protect my own life and well being that beginning the process of asking my body to foster the life of another pushed a lot of hard truths to the surface. I couldn’t live at a sprint anymore. Constant perseverance was hampering my ability to create a new life; it was slowly extinguishing every part of me, including my desire to live my own. But, I still needed to see to understand. 

Burnout at its core is the extinguishing of purpose, passion, and pleasure. What has made my experience of it especially insidious was how much of my connection to those three qualities was achieved exclusively through external means—a scaffolding that I had erected around my soft interior, eclipsing more than illuminating. When that scaffolding was dismantled, I found myself much like a lobster without a shell, squeamishly searching for a place to hide in the down deep. I was far beyond some simple kind of rekindling. I had to reconnect with some very elemental knowledge of self if I was to begin any kind of recovery. 

***

Starting my garden beds from scratch last Spring was what ultimately revealed the way to mutually assured abundance. Gardening, at its root, is an exercise in hope, relating to the earth from a silent belief in the promise within. It focuses on an outward expression of inward health: your plants are a direct reflection of their environment and growing conditions.

My inaugural growing season revealed that truth with a first showing that was spotty and strange. Anemic sprouts of Sulphur Cosmos, with one or two scraggly blooms, were the first to arrive. After all of my careful planting, and the construction of the beds themselves, I still had so much to learn. The ragged blooms came and went, and empty patches from withered away plants advanced as the season did. Finally, one strange and large Sulphur Cosmos emerged. Its stalk thick, it stood at over three feet with dense green foliage—but no flowers. For the longest time, no flowers. The persistent lack of flowers as the weeks elapsed drove me crazy. Was it the heat, or not enough water? Was the window for blooms closed, as my own fertility was on the cusp of? Why wouldn’t they give their blooms to me? I’m sure the bees were just as impatient.

In the meantime, I started to learn more about tending soil, what amendments I could add—bone meal, blood meal, earth worm castings, cow manure, bat guano. Beautifully grotesque, each one reeked of death, but teamed with life. I ordered live earth worms and invited my friend’s five year old twins over to help me rehome them in my beds. The twins arrived at my garden one Saturday morning with their tiny gardening gloves and marveled at the worms’ wriggling arrays as we carefully extracted them, tiny finger fulls at a time, and placed them in little borrows in the soil with a dash of worm food to get them started. 

That day, I also observed that one bed was showered in the gentle, ascendant morning light, while the other baked in the descent of the late afternoon’s much harsher rays. As a result, the latter needed much more water than the former. It was not favoritism, just the observation of a greater need. By the end of Summer, the Sulphur Cosmos in my bed that bore the brunt of the late day’s light was finally, miraculously, studded with blooms. In the charmed morning light of my other bed, a comically lush row of equally tall Basil plants had taken over. They grew long past any interest in pesto could be feigned, later coated in tiny white flowers much to the honeybee’s delight, and lasting until the first freeze of the season. 

From the start, I knew that I wanted to embrace the ethos of chaos gardening. I would strive to create a wild ecosystem rather than tidy rows, and let the plants grow as they wanted to grow—like an English cottage garden long abandoned, unfurling to its own true nature. The way the eye dances across those kinds of spaces with their unkempt crescendos and intertwined plants matched the cadence of my jazz brain that was always hopping from this to that, finding connections and meaning more readily in untidiness than rigid order. I needed movement to think, and my plants needed the agency of their own movement to foster life, to grow.

My garden beds are dedicated first to natives and pollinator-friendly plants, and second to plantings for us to eat. This Spring, I tried a variety of tomato plants, and after spending the last year studying and enriching my plots, the vines are now absolutely swollen with fruit. I often have to squat and awkwardly brace myself to gather the ripened tomatoes from the shadowy world that their wild vines create. Now, every night after harvesting, when I pull my hair back to wash my face, my fingers find seed after seed burrowed in my hair. The seeds that I find are always Sulphur Cosmos, the ones that first taught me to listen, to set the stage for life rather than attempting to forge it like weaponry.

This year, the seeds from last Spring’s massive Sulphur Cosmos, self-sown, were also the first to germinate. They needed little intervention from me this time, aside from the usual rhythm of care that had emerged between us, the product of that slow observation and waiting. 

Observing rather than acting is not a behavior that comes naturally to me, but all of this has really not been about me. It’s been about listening, nurturing, and, in this case, gratefully harvesting. Perhaps it is a little bit about me, because at the same time, that first Spring, I was also learning what my own soft form needed after the skin of incessant external demands was peeled back. I found myself weak, emotions calcified, senses stunted. For the first time, I was allowed to slide into this lost birthright of simply being, but I hardly knew how. 

***

At first, all that I could do was binge watch Below Deck, a reality TV show on Bravo about the crews that work on luxury yachts. Their staccato of incessant work became my preferred background noise as I detoxed from my own marathon of grinding. The hardest part was detaching a rubric of output and productivity, a constant performance evaluation, from how I understood both my days and myself. After only seeing myself as a resource to extract value from for so long, I was like the endless acres of spent land during the dust bowl: no longer soil; I was sand. It took time before I learned that I could apply the same tactics from my garden to my own rehabilitation: slow observation, waiting, listening, nurturing. 

What I ultimately learned seems so simple now. If I would nourish my heart and my body, it would in turn offer healthy abundance, not as some gold star or reward, but because now it could. It’s not an exchange so much as equipping: I will anticipate and meet your needs, and in turn, you will have the capacity to grow, to become more than enough. “More than enough” often feels like a foreign concept, as it is not a phrase readily uttered in this culture when regarding our relationship to resources. We are taught to take, not to tend. 

This is the reciprocity Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about in Braiding Sweetgrass. It is not the one-way street of an extractive posture. It is engagement with our environment, nourishment before (and after) procurement, patience, and gratitude. This is what is so often missing from our current climate, whose strings are pulled by so many different Veruca Salts with all of their varying motives, but with the same intense refrain of now and more. 

It’s not our fault that this consideration of replenishment is missing. We have often become so numb to our own agency and instincts, worked so deep to the bone as we are, that before long into the tenure of adulthood all we can dream of is recovery. A break. Outstretched hands pleading “gimme” to no one in particular, and for nothing in particular, just some vague idea of comfort. And always from the outside. 

***

To find myself again, I had to remember that my worth was not a thing to be proven or externally evaluated, it just was. My worth had nothing to do with what I earned, created, or did for others. I didn’t have to be perfect or virtuous or always right to be worthy. But I would have to feel it to truly know it. 

To feel it, I had to continue to nourish myself, to continue to remove all of the many layers of dry husk that still obscured my softness. It was not a lever or a button I could push. It would be a process, and within that process, my needs had the right to change. Just like my garden beds were nothing to look at in Winter, they still held all of the promise of Spring. A hidden yet potent kernel, an invisible truth. To truly embody the authentic nature of growth means embracing the fallow times, because true growth is not the same thing as constant productivity. 

These days, most of my spare generative energy not spoken for by the garden beds has been redirected back towards IVF and supporting a life beyond my own. I have surrendered to a process that is random on its kindest days, but, this time, without the burden of constant grabbing from the outside—because that is what I needed. That adjustment, as well as the ability to nap on-demand (the greatest luxury I have ever known), has made the highs and lows easier to take, and allowed me to protect my heart. I have also come to the conclusion that work, for me, does not need to be so high stakes. I am no longer willing to stretch the delicate membrane of myself so thin. I am perfectly fine with operating at low power mode right now, because I am pretty sure that ambition is a Ponzi scheme anyway. Ambition, being soaked through with ego as it is, is no stand in for joyful purpose, for the permission to experiment, to fail and to grow. 

There is a way to move in the world that leaves a path of extraction, and a way that leaves a path of regeneration. When we move in a raw and rare pursuit of singular goals, no matter the obstacles or friction met along the way, the prize is often a hollow pause followed by the immediate setting-of-sights on the next triumph. What has been gravely missed in that context is meaning—meaning which we often find not through accomplishment, but through the embrace of connection, empathy, and growth along the way. What is accomplishment without meaning? It’s an empty refrain of expectation and blind, flailing pursuit. 

All that really matters to me now is that my needs are met without my soul paying interest. Connection, collaboration, experimentation, joy even, I think that I have the right to expect that, too. I would rather make a snail’s progress as it allows me to remain present and awake to myself and those around me. It allows this life to continue to feel real, known, felt. That is what I have learned to trust; that is what I know to be true. 

I see now that my biggest lesson while living in that old way was what came from not tending my own garden, not trusting what it told me, letting outside voices drown out what only those seedlings could say. I know that I won’t make that mistake again, because now I am continuing the daily practice of operating from a place of inherent worth. Once any of us has awakened to that fundamental truth about ourselves—that our value is not externally deemed or defined—we begin to drink from something deeper. Deeper because it is within us and not granted by fickle winds that can only be counted on to change direction. This tonic allows our expressions to become grounded in something true and eternal. A pleasure and purpose that is self-sustaining. The challenge is taking that first sip in a climate that would rather see us unmoored and dry.

But here is the secret: become active in your attention, and passive in your aims. Because days and lives are not for conquering, they are for revealing.  Allow the world to reveal itself to you, as you reveal yourself to it. A reciprocal unfurling, rooted in love, trust, and an attentive mind. For we are throttled with an overwhelm so great, the natural reaction is passivity. We either give in, or we grind on, heads down. But the answer is neither of these things. The greatest antidote to overwhelm is to slow down and pay attention.