Turning to seed: Botanical time and violence
The first year in a new home is marked by tracing the journeys of light.
I have lived in Scotland for nine months now, for a near-complete rotation through the seasons. October was spent almost entirely indoors, waiting for plaster to dry on the walls, listening to the sound that a new carpet makes as it bounces up after the first footsteps.
The early walks on the riverside path that starts behind the house were tentative. It seemed like I was outside just enough to see the bracken brown and bend towards the ground, to notice the last of the rosebay willowherb be drained of its chlorophyll, withering like a spider's web in the sun.
The house started to feel familiar when I could faithfully predict the movement of winter light.
By the time I finished my breakfast porridge on November mornings, sunlight would have reached the edge of the bookshelf. On the first snowy day, I picked up branches of larch pine cones that had fallen onto the forest floor. They found their spot on the bookshelves too. By March, the branches had become their own sundial, catching the brightness of daylight savings and casting shadows on the living room wall.
Outdoor ventures in the winter were almost inherently hopeful. Anything that emerged out of the ground--hints of the first snowdrops or daffodils, crocuses, iris rosettes--functioned as a compass, consistently pulling me outside to see if today might be the day we see a leaf or a blossom.
I cherished the quiet anticipation of that time more than the loud exuberance of spring. I liked paying attention to the soil and practicing the faith that waiting inspires.
By May, my vision for what was blooming tended punishingly towards the new, the buds, the young leaves. I wanted to learn to notice the withering: the dried daffodils, the wild garlic that did not exude scent any more.
This has been the unexpected gift of my first Scottish summer. There is no discreet decay. When an iris has finished blooming, it wilts weepingly. It wants everyone to know. While my first few months in a new country and a new home were punctuated by measuring expanding light and forward motion, summer has introduced another axis of time.
After the bluebells finished blooming, they zipped up into seedpods. When wild carrot starts turning to seed, it folds into itself like a fist. These days the foxgloves are also going to seed, with their pods looking like buttons on a tuxedo shirt, done up to the very top.
Until this year, I had never paid much attention to seedpods. After a plant finished blooming, I would look around it, as though it had never been there at all. I am not sure if this was a dignifying averting of the gaze, or a callous one. What I do know is that becoming attuned to the cycle of wilting and seeding has reoriented my sense of 'forward,' of progress and of time.
In his book In Praise of Forgetting, David Rieff expresses skepticism about the concept of progress. He questions the assumption of inevitability that the notion of 'progress' quietly contains.
Looking at the headlines today, it is easy to find resonance with Rieff's critique. Yet, arguing that perhaps we are not living in a time of progress at all can be met with resistance. Barack Obama used to say that history zigs and zags, perhaps inspired by the Martin Luther King Jr quote that he had woven into a White House rug during his presidency: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Some of us, it appears, need the faith in the bending in order to carry on.
All year long, another life has been running parallel to my light-tracing endeavors and botanical curiosities. After the last of winter brightness left the living room each morning, I would go upstairs to the office. Day after day, I have sat among field notes and interview transcripts from my research in Colombia. The goal is to piece together a story about the politics of victimhood during transitions from violence.
Telling this story well involves paying attention to verb tenses. What gets relegated to the past? What is pronounced finished, over and concluded? How does present violence disrupt tidy narratives of endings? And what are the moments in which, both despite violence and because of it, people articulate an aspirational vision of their identities, relationships, and politics in the future?
Like David Rieff, and like the seedpods I have learned to notice, the interlocutors in my research challenge ideas about the linearity of time and directionality of progress. They do not suffer harm in the context of armed conflict, then file a claim in 'peacetime,' then access justice in the 'post-conflict', then move on. There is no 'then.' Every next step points backwards or sideways or folds in on itself, like a wild carrot plant turning to seed.
Relating conflict-affected individuals' stories faithfully requires allowing my interlocutors to narrate time as they experience it. It requires resisting the projection of my optimism, of my hopeful gaze at January soil. It requires acknowledging that something blooms while something else withers and yet a third branch turns to seed, all in the same life. And it also requires learning to recognize the lessons gleaned from land and light.
Poem of the moment
Jane Hirshfield has taught me to listen to land and light, and to see the politics they carry. Her short poem Cataclysm, has been on my mind this week. It is published in Orion magazine, accessible for free here.
Continuing the conversation
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