If I’ve known you through at least one spring and not just from a hobby like dance socials, you’ll have heard me wax rhapsodic about native spring ephemerals.
To sum up: gorgeous flowers that appear in difficult environments after a long struggle, and only for a short time. You can see the appeal, metaphorically speaking.
But it hit me a few years back that this is a very anthropocentric way of viewing spring ephemerals. Why would I view their lives in the dirt as a preamble? They’re plants. Surely that’s where the bulk of any plant’s life is lived. Just because the green and blooming parts are where we can see them doesn’t mean that they’re the important parts, to a plant.
Let’s try to look at this instead from the plant’s point of view:
At some point in the past, an ant (let’s go with trilliums and trout lilies) carried away a delicious seed to feast on. This planted it at just the right depth and in just the right soil conditions to grow.
It took its time. The first few years, it worked on its roots, tasting the soil to learn where the nutrients and moisture were most likely to be found. (Darwin thought a plant’s brains were in the tips of its roots, kind of like the distributed intelligence of an octopus. Plant neurobiologists — yes, a real thing — are exploring this idea now.) Around year four, it put out its first leaf. These flowers live in difficult environments, that is true; they grow in deciduous forests, which means — outside of a few weeks in spring when the trees have yet to bud — shade. For those few weeks, it feasts on sunlight; then the leaf withers and it goes back to its life underground. The next year, it puts out two leaves for the same few weeks. Trilliums have one more year to put out one more leaf, but trout lilies only have two.
In the spring of year six or seven, the flower blooms. One bloom only, for part of the few weeks when the sun hits the forest floor. A few weeks to eat sun, and a week or so for sex, then back to the dirt.
These spring ephemerals may enjoy sex, who knows? But they don’t need it. Most of their reproduction is through their roots, sending up new shoots after the main plant is established. They will produce one gloriously delicious seed (if you’re an ant) every year, but just one. However if that first seed hits a good patch of dirt with good sun in the spring, it will become a colony all on its own, each of which will follow its own cycle of one leaf one spring, two leaves the next spring, and maybe blooming after that.
Its real life is in the dirt.
Dirt is the kingdom of death because dirt is made up of dead stuff. Life feeds on death. Older cultures had some way of grappling with this productively, but modern western culture does not like death, dirt, or darkness. We’re in a constant battle against all three via medicine, hygiene, and electric lights. Not that these are bad things; I like my manufactured insulin, soap and reading lamps greatly. The problem is when they’re taken to the point of trying to eliminate death, dirt and darkness instead of managing them to reduce suffering. Life doesn’t exist without death and dirt. If you get rid of them, you kill everything. And our light pollution has terrible effects on many life forms that we are just beginning to understand.
Of course my love affair with spring ephemerals was never about literal death; it was about suffering. That something so beautiful could grow in a hard place; that it took a long time, but what you got for years of dirt and darkness was a brief but beautiful flower. Maybe not as prolific as dandelions (but we are actively at war against the profligacy of dandelions) or as reliable and visible as sunny garden annuals, but worth it.
Our literal and metaphorical obsession with sunny garden annuals drives me nuts. We want blossoms and people that are sunny, bright, pretty, low-maintenance, spread reliably, stay in their place, produce mountains of flowers for as long as possible, and have an easy sort of prosperity that doesn’t ask too much. But, jesus, how awful the world would be if every flower and every person was a marigold. Marigolds are party animals, gobbling sunlight and having orgies all summer long, which is fun! And fine! In wide-open gardens with lots of light and no trees. But do we want to cut down all the forests so every flower can be a marigold? (Maybe we do.) (Literally and metaphorically.) “Good vibes only” is hate speech.
Basically, my love of spring ephemerals was a way to love my own life, to insist on the right to be a trout lily in a world where only marigold-people are valued.
I’m not sure what happens to my beloved metaphor when you put the real work and life of all plants in the dirt, but let’s see.
Sometimes, hurt people hurt people. What side of that equation you fall on will determine whether your hurt is soothed or stigmatized. Are you the hurt people who hurts people? Or are you the people who hurt people hurt?
Dad, for example, was not permitted to be hurt by his mother’s abusive actions; he was required to talk about how she did her best and she loved them all the way she knew how, and keep a smile plastered on his face for the comfort of those around him. However, when it came to hurting me, his hurt at the hands of his mother was the perfect excuse, and then it became my job to grin and bear the hurt he could not digest or metabolize himself.
Toxic Positivity and mandatory happiness are selectively enforced: if you are a perpetrator, the hurt you cause is assumed to be the direct result of the hurt you’ve experienced, and no one is allowed to be angry at you; but your victim’s hurt at your hands will be used to stigmatize them for suffering if they dare to express it except in the most positive ways and limited circumstances. Victims can receive more sympathy when they become victimizers. I’d assume that this is the opposite of what we want, collectively, except for all the evidence of every time we make that happen.
Cycle breakers find themselves in an ugly spot: the only way to break a dysfunctional or abusive family’s cycle is by feeling all the things you were never allowed to feel. Everything you were told you’d imagined or made up or misremembered or over-reacted to, everything that was “not that bad” or “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Every bit of anger and shame and grief and loss, all of it, needs to be felt, because it’s through feeling that you understand what happened to you and commit to not doing it to anyone else.
This is bringing tree shade into the garden, and the marigolds will be unamused.
I dated a man for several months in the last few years who had a family somewhat like mine. But, as they say, hurt people hurt people — and he took that as entitlement. And when he hurt me, he apologized to me for how his father had mistreated him and explained how he couldn’t help it. From the well-preserved dead bodies of his hurt, nothing beautiful grew.
25
There’s no shortage of books that teach us how to live.
Every quarter multiplies imperatives:
How to be rich, thin, resilient, eco, cool;
How to pick up women, do your makeup, cheat in school.Of these skills, we poets impart few.
We’ve kind of lost the common ground.
This is our moment to dig down.The ground is where we’re headed, every one:
Picked clean by endangered vultures, burnt and sprinkled round,
Tucked tight in urns or boxed neat underground.Death’s the one place that finally evades
Sarah Tolmie, The Art of Dying
All news, all ties, all gender, race and creed.
Where we dissolves to I and dissipates, relieved.
Once upon a time, in Ohio, a girl was born. Her family was not a good one. Her father raped her; her mother allowed it. To cope, she turned to nature and to poetry.
Neither of them healed her in the way popularly conceived by today’s tiktok therapists and wellness influencers; she never really trusted people and avoided them in large groups.
What she went through is unforgiveable and there is no reason or justification for it. Her poetry is not the silver living of her tragedies. But the pain that led her to the woods became something beautiful for the whole english-speaking world to enjoy, and she is one of the few poets of the later twentieth century to make a decent living from poetry.
Mary Oliver’s poetry made something beautiful from something ugly. If there had been no ugliness, there would have been no beauty. Or not that beauty, of that kind. And if she had avoided her pain or what had been done to her, what would her poems have been like? Could they have spoken to people, do you think?
I planted wild ginger in my garden last year, and it bloomed this spring for the first time. I’m having a hard time finding much about its life cycle, though it seems pretty similar to other native spring ephemerals: the seeds are delicious to ants, who disperse them after eating the coating, but wild ginger usually colonizes by its roots instead; it takes the seeds at least one year (a warm spell followed by a cold spell and then another warm spell) to germinate. But what I find most interesting about them is that the flowers are right flush against the dirt.
They’re beautiful flowers, and growing in a location guaranteed not to be seen by what most people think of as pollinators: bees, butterflies, etc. The warm-and-cuddlies of the garden. One website said they are pollinated mostly by flies.
The magic of dirt (and it is magic, I think; I don’t know why we keep looking for miracles on other worlds or in other dimensions when there are so many of them here) is that it is made up of death but gives life.
But it’s not instantaneous; there’s a process. When something dies, it is broken down into its constituent parts through digestion. Nutrients get taken out and shaken around and excreted into useable forms in a new context. We may not like death, dirt and darkness, but decomposers love all three, and good thing too because without them life couldn’t exist. All our beautiful garden flowers exist and bloom only because of death and the slow steady work of the organisms who feed on it. Even if we buy our garden dirt in plastic bags, what we are buying is formerly living things that have passed through a digestive system or two. We are buying death, which means suffering.
Of course, taking the fruits of decomposition from elsewhere, so that the rotting and smells and eating and shit and bits of bone and fungi and worms and beetles and blood and goop all happen off stage and are, once sanitized and odourless, packaged up for sale and administered in exactly the right quantities, is a very different experience from plants who live where the dying and eating and shitting and smelling and rotting and beetling are being done. But regardless, all plants, including marigolds and trout lilies, have their feet — or possibly their brains — permanently rooted in well-rotted death.
I’m trying to find the words to describe what this means for human experience; it works perfectly as a metaphor but I can’t quite break it down into its parts. We need to metabolize our experiences; that means they need to be eaten.
We want to rank our feelings. Our feelings are often ranked for us, by our friends and families and mental health professionals and spiritual leaders. Negative feelings are “bad.” You should never feel anger — or guilt — or shame — or rage — or bitterness — or schadenfreude — or anxiety. Depression is maladaptive. Grief should end by a certain date. Feelings should dissipate in 90 seconds. (I’ve never heard anyone apply that rule to positive or fun emotions.) Happiness is a choice — and not only that, it’s the right choice, a moral imperative.
I think this means we reject the experiences that cause us to feel the feelings we’ve been told are “bad” or “wrong,” and fail to metabolize them; the experiences mummify, the feelings fossilize, the person gets stuck. It’s only an action taken as a result of a feeling that can be right or wrong; if you hurt yourself or someone else because of your anger, shame, grief, etc., that’s a problem. But if you just feel it? Why would that be judged?
We mummify our feelings, wrap them in layers of toxic crap so we don’t have to look at or feel them, stick them underground where we hope they’ll go away; then they jostle there together, intact, unfelt; so we cover them with astroturf, stick in a bunch of plastic flowers and call it a garden. That’s “happiness.”
The main thing about metabolizing — digesting — anything, is that it becomes part of you. Down at the cell level. You eat a fish taco and the seaweed that fed the fish is now propping up your skeleton and wiring your neurons together. Same thing with experiences. And it feels so unbearably unfair that something terrible you never would have chosen becomes part of you down at your cell level. Rejecting it feels better. Smiley-er. Healing, popularly conceived, means being the person you would have been. But a terrible thing did happen and I think when you let it alter you, really digest it, it becomes building blocks for something else. Maybe not the thing you planned. Maybe not something you would have chosen. But better than rattling around full of dead metaphorical bodies for the rest of your life that you are determined not to eat because you didn’t pick them, or they don’t taste good.
I have some questions about the experiences of plants that no one can yet answer for me.
Does terroir have terroir, for a plant? That questing bit of root probing through the dirt for nutrients and water, does it taste the difference between a well-rotted log thoroughly broken down by fungi and what used to be a deer passed through the gut of a turkey vulture? Or is all nitrogen just nitrogen, to a plant?
And when the seedling first pokes through into sunshine — when it’s dug down deep enough to latch itself to ground, to have enough water and nutrition, to hold itself in wind and storms, and it pokes out into new territory and unfurls that first green leaf — and the sunlight hits, and turns into sugar — does it taste sweet?
Marigolds are, possibly, fortunate. They are colourful and they are easy. They live only about half their lives in the dirt, and that dirt is pre-digested, well-fertilized, furrowed, weeded, and bright. They receive care. Their children are packaged for sale in little paper envelopes all over the world. They are, possibly, a bit smug. They take their parties for granted, their endless summer seasons with bees and space and lots of dessert. They’re in the sun within a few weeks of the seed hitting dirt. If other flowers haven’t done as well as us, they think, it’s because they’re tied to their woodlands. They should just let that go. Spend more than a few weeks above ground, maybe! It’s easy! Helping hands will always come along to yank the dandelions and provide water and food. Why do they make things so hard for themselves, why do they push the world away? The world is safe and predictable. They should just come live in the garden like the rest of us.
In a forest not too far away, a trout lily has spent a few years in hard dirt. There are rocks and tree roots, clay and drought. Carefully it has dug itself an under ground safe haven — as safe as they get — it has found water and nutrition. Rhizomes from the trees and fungi and perennials carry it news and food and a little bit of encouragement, as well as warnings. It is time, though. The trees are waking up; the sap is flowing; spring is coming. The ground is thawing out. Its first stem pushes the last of the dirt away and emerges into air, its first leaf furls out like a hungry green tongue, eating its first meal. The giants of the tree trunks nearby already cast more shade than the marigolds could tolerate. So this is sun, it thinks. It is pretty wonderful. I wouldn’t mind eating more than once a year. And maybe it wonders what it would be like to live in a garden, so cared for, fed and safe, mulched and watered. But then to be so crowded, never alone, no time to rest or reflect, always eating processed junk, never to win your own patch of sun. So much noise. I think I prefer it my way, it thinks. And besides — I’ll be back next year, and they won’t.
Zoopolis 
One thought on “Upside Down (br#20)”