Metaphor has been my primary life teacher. Euphemisms are everywhere and I do mean EVERYWHERE. I even nightmare in metaphor, most recently about a plethora of gorillas being hunted and used to test medicines that made their skin fall off in chunks. I sense your shock and horror dear Reader, if that’s the type of hell to follow if THE WORLD were to suddenly appear in technicolor metaphor-bites.
Maybe, and if it does, you’ll be very, very lucky-ish.
Metaphors are a way to get a 3-D viewpoint—even nightmares about gorillas. In that terrible scenario, gorillas represented blindly accepting a suggestion. The dream-metaphor offered something I may not have come to on my own—an ability to feel what it might be like to accept a specific suggestion—my skin falling off in chunks. Yikes.
On a typical day, I sort through metaphors at least a half-dozen times. The easiest to determine are not through dreams, but via nature and my garden. A recent exercise involving the roots of a Maple tree represented transitions and, yesterday, another enormous root system illuminated an overlooked, yet obvious complexity in recovering from authoritarianism.
Rigid Roots
Composting is a responsible and caring give-back to the soil. Humans drag nutrients out of the blessing beneath our feet. A compost pile returns the favor, plus the big bonus of keeping beneficial nutrients out of the landfill and in our gardens. Win-WIN. I’ve had vegetable and flower gardens for thirty-four-years and attempted and failed at composting. I quit after one season over twenty years ago, since the apparatus I was using was cumbersome and didn’t work. And, it was another mundane “to do” thing.
At the start of the previous winter, a ridiculous point to consider it, I decided to take up composting again, this time au-natural—a pile in a corner of a garden bed. Living in the Midwest, pre-winter isn’t much different than full-winter. It’s bitterly cold with or without snow and by December, shovels and hoes are stashed until spring. Embarking on a compost pile after the lovely months have ended would be ill-advised and heckled at a farmer’s market. No one wants to slog out to a compost pile on a beautiful seventy-degree day, let alone during the darkly suspicious hours of a freezing day.
Along with timing, my assessment for choosing a compost spot was laden by miss-thinking. Miss-thinking is a term I use to describe ideas that come from good intentions underlined with “make it as easy as possible.” Often, those “make it as easy as possible” concepts go on to make something the very hardest thing imaginable. As was the case with my well-intentioned compost pile.
Managing to trot the tundra through winter, it seemed my compost idea was working well. The spot was in one corner of a vegetable plot. I’d designated the corner with the most invasive stumps as the best area since it was feasible the compost might suffocate the roots and I wouldn’t have to dig them up if the pile shifted to another corner.
Ahhh, such sweetly bountiful hopes.
In this segment of “make it as easy as possible” it should be noted that letting a garden go dormant for over five years doesn’t preclude tending the soil and removing weeds and invasive roots. I double-relearned that “hardest thing imaginable” lesson when I rebooted the dormant garden and compost pile at the same time, leading to digging up resistant, rigid roots while defining miss-thinking and authoritarianism.
During the latter part of the summer, I had trouble turning over the compost pile due to a thickened mass several inches down. Assuming I hadn’t turned it well earlier in the growing season, I didn’t investigate until the last cucumber was picked and readying the garden for closure. While cleaning out the beds, I decided to shovel out an above-ground root that had recently sprouted shoots. It was slow work, the root crossing two beds before ending at a stump obscured by the compost pile. Yeah, that one. The same pile I had purposefully engineered on top of invasive stumps to “make it as easy as possible.” I discovered the greenery of the invasive species had indeed been smothered until it meandered to another bed and worked its way up to the light. Never underestimate the will to survive.
Many sweaty hours later, slowly tracking several stumps sneakily rooting through the garden, I uncovered the compost density problem and began thinking about the layers of a rigid authoritarian root system. It came to me that I have been feeding my life on top of invasive authoritarian stumps for the past three decades and all the while the roots choke my ability to live freely. On the surface everything seems bountiful. Though it doesn’t turn easily, the soil looks reasonably healthy. Blooming should be happening, nutrients have been provided—family, friends, therapy, purposeful work, writing—and yet, the big blooms don’t come. Because, underneath it all, the old stumps still live. This fall, I’ll begin an arduous process of uprooting those metaphor stumps and finish off the rest of the real ones in the garden.
If you’re interested in learning to spot symbolism and metaphor in your own garden, the next newsletter will provide tips for dreaming about wild animals and spotting invasive species. I bet you can’t wait.
"Blooming should be happening, nutrients have been provided—family, friends, therapy, purposeful work, writing—and yet, the big blooms don’t come. Because, underneath it all, the old stumps still live." I read that at least 4 times... then I sent the whole shebang to a plethora of peeps I thought would relate. The first text I got back said, "ok fine.. we can work on my old stumps... " What a glorious way to understand/view "what lies beneath.." Thank you!!
As for those stumps and their gnarly roots, we’ll they take time and work to get out. But when you pull the stump out snapping off the last of the roots it is such a freeing feeling.
May your garden grow evermore beautiful.