Winter light
On death and gardening
I suppose I should preface this newsletter post with a trigger warning that it covers the subject of death. But I think perhaps the sub-heading gives that away already. This is not intended as a morbid or morose post. To everyone who is mourning or grieving (and those who might just find winter difficult), I see you and am mourning and grieving with you too. Sending much love to you.
The first time I saw a dead person I was nine years old. It wasn’t anything gory. It was someone that I knew and who had died of natural causes. They were “old” (in my young mind) and I saw them laid out in a chapel of rest. Still, it haunted me for a very, very long time. I was terrified of death for an even longer time. We’re not particularly good at death in our Western culture, where we always seem one step removed from natural processes. I think it’s called progress. Death is hidden away. Not something to be seen or even talked about.
I don’t feel we’re particularly well equipped to know how to deal with death (or grief come to that). At least, I know that I wasn’t.
But of the many unexpected lessons that gardening has taught me over the years, it’s that death is an intrinsic, even necessary part of life. The wonder and joy of life - precious and fragile and fleeting - that we value so very much…well, it would not exist without death.
These thoughts drifted into my mind as I looked out over the garden this week in its rusting glory, as I marvel at how achingly beautiful this time of year is to me now. It wasn’t always thus. This season - one that mostly signifies a slide into rest, withdrawal and decay - used to hold an overbearing weight of sadness and melancholy, perhaps even fear and dread, for me. And as I walked the dogs through a veil of mist that wrapped itself around us and we padded across a thick carpet of fallen, golden beech leaves in the woods, I wondered whether this fundamental shift in my appreciation of these autumn and winter months hasn’t occurred in tandem with the act of gardening having helped me to better understand and accept death as a process of life.
In a society which seems to compel us to be ever more insular, inward-looking and individualistic, the garden has provided me with an opening to tune into something wider, deeper, more universal. Far bigger than me and my life. It gives me perspective on our interconnectedness in a system much larger than us (and on our responsibilities towards each other too). We are all mortal in the end. We will all return to earth in the end. Which will give rise to more life, more growth and more beauty.
There is no light without dark
No energy without rest
No Spring without Winter
No life without death
As a gardener we quickly learn that the cycle of life is played out continuously in the garden. As winter approaches, gardens seem so obviously on the turn: fading, declining and decaying… but of course there is always growth (even in winter), and always death and decay (even in summer) in the garden. Everything is constantly circling and regenerating. Where the beginnings and endings are becomes harder to discern as I see that death nourishes life. To cultivate a garden has been to cultivate an understanding and perspective of life and our place in it.
I don’t mean to minimise the pain and tragedy of a life lost. Especially those that are cruelly cut short. This is simply a part of my journey and processing what death and mortality means to me. A subject that feels ever more present the older I get, the older the people I love get and the more I experience loss.
I re-read Robert Pogue Harrison’s book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, this spring and I realised how much the chapter on Epicurus, the Ancient Greek philosopher, and his garden school really struck me. It resonated in a way I don’t remember it doing when I first read it over ten years ago now. Here are two snippets I bookmarked from that chapter:
“Death neither negates nor terminates life but gives birth to its intrinsic potentialities, especially its potentiality for appearance. Without death there is no fulfilment of potentiality nor any ever-changing moods of the phenomenal world. […] Death sets things into motion, including our desires. It is the generative source of nature’s ceaseless movement into form […]. Appearances owe their poignancy — their almost unbearable beauty and power of evocation — to the time-boundedness that attunes us to the fleeting moods of nature.”
[…]
“…among the ancients Epicurus was one of the very few who called on his disciples to cultivate mortality. He did not call on them to heroically defy its limitations, nor to submit stoically to its necessity, but rather to cultivate mortality as the means as well as end of happiness. He looked at the human world in dark times and saw the absurdity of its dominant compulsions, its perverse drive to conspire against the condition of serenity, its tendencies to bring on sufferings that had little to do with the gods and everything to do with the human failure to humanise the world. Stoic resignation was not enough. Stoicism called for apathy, whereas Epicureanism called for self-responsibility, the pleasures of community, and a relationship to death that saw death as the proper fulfilment of life.”
(That second paragraph particularly - goodness, did that land for me in these times of heightened climate, racial and social injustice we’re living through…)
I think perhaps in winter, I only used to see the dark and the death of it. Gardening has taught me to more fully appreciate the light and the life that winter and death holds too.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter since its launch last week, whether on the free plan or paid. And thank you to everyone who has got in touch about submitting an article for Radicle. I’ve had the first few trickle in and look forward to pressing publish on contributor articles soon.
If you would like to write something or have any questions on pitching or submitting, please get in touch. I think some people might be over-worrying about it or over-thinking it. Your writing doesn’t need to be polished, there is no format to follow and your piece does not need to be formal in any way. I’m aware that the very people I am keen to spotlight the most are those who aren’t used to having their voices heard, much less valued. If you feel you have something to say about gardening, plants or your connection and relationship to the natural world, I would love the hear from you. Everyone is welcome, however you write or speak, whatever your approach is to the subject.
You can e-mail me at: decolonisethegarden@gmail.com