Death and Gardens

[The butterfly is one current guide for me. Not only does the monarch have a special pact with death through its ceremonial role of bringing the souls of the dead back for Dia de los Muertos, but it is also a dramatic symbol of metamorphosis. It heads inward to the cocoon to completely transform itself for it's next phase of life.]

Day of the Dead and all of its joyful eerie revelry in the mingling of the living and the dead has passed, and the door to the spirit world is largely shut for another year. This time of year in New England is accompanied by a palpable death of the year. Departing and silencing of wild creatures and faded bones of formerly flowering plants. In my old homestead this time of year was the dark time. We lived on limited solar power and didn't make much in the winter, so during these short days we would light candles and oil lamps at night and save the electricity for the water pump and the cd player. It gets hard to stay up more than an hour or two past dark in a quiet house in the woods lit by candles and woodstove fire. I almost became part of the wildlife in a rhythm of hibernation. Like the squirrels and birds though, the few free daylight hours would be full of busy activity to be ready for winter, like hauling, chopping and stacking wood. Becoming ready for keeping light and warmth in the darkness. Seeing the death of the year and feeling the cold and hearing the silence, accompanied by all those hours of solitude and darkness always turns my mind to thoughts of death and closure.

Even here, where it is almost always warm and sunny, it is cooler than it was a few weeks ago and I can hardly believe it but the leaves are falling from the sycamores and some other trees of northern origin on my street. Although the temperatures aren't much different than summertime, the trees still feel compelled to uphold their inner cycles. A time for outward growth, and a time to turn inward and still. The light slants differently now and the days are dark earlier. It's less dramatic and compelling than the north, but the season has turned here as well. The year is dying.

It is sad, another year going by. But as the festivities of Dia de Los Muertos remind us, death can be a friend, an ally, and a guide to experiencing the present and doing the most that we can with what we’ve got. I recently read an essay by Shaman Maggie Wahls on death and being impeccable. She writes:

"The [shaman] has a personal relationship with death, not one of adversary but one of necessity and even sustenance. Walking with this understanding allows one to see the beauty in every vision, every action, and every moment of one’s life. It is not about becoming perfect. Perfection is striving to be one better than your neighbor, to achieve status, to break a record. Perfection causes striving and since it is never attained, it leaves the striver unfulfilled, unhappy and unsatisfied. But a life lived impeccably is filled with joy, with wonder and with satisfaction that every action, thought and word was the very best effort one could make."

This is a good message for me. I am taking the death of the year as a guide. Life has felt pretty emotionally challenging to me for a long time now. (Who isn’t it emotionally challenging for though? That’s kind of the nature of life if you are paying attention.) I guess I mean that I have been plagued with some unnecessary and troubling emotional baggage. Sometimes lately I feel lonely or depressed, but I've decided to stop with that. These same feelings of loss and depression have been visiting me periodically since my divorce and departure from the homestead. I felt like the life I had in the beautiful woods with my ex-husband was so perfect for me in some ways but not in others, and then my new life with a wonderful husband and family but lots of moving around and chaos is so perfect for me in some ways but not in others. I’m letting that feeling go though. I’m done with it. I’m letting it die. I’m deciding that it is all perfect, I just don’t always understand how. (Kudos here to Rill, up on her mountain in Shrewsbury, for telling me when I was 12 that “everything is perfect we just haven’t figured out how yet.” I thought it was the most confusing and possibly the stupidest thing I had ever heard, but it has lived on in my psyche all these years and I finally embrace what she meant!) Perfect in this case doesn’t mean always nice or beautiful or easy, it just means that it is all as it should be and every choice and happening is aligning and evolving in a harmony larger than what we can fathom. I tell myself this a lot, but for some reason now I finally believe it. Changing my idea of perfection is going to allow me to be more impeccable and appreciative of this current time of change and growth. Metamorphosis.

Last bit of news for the week, which brings me incredible joy in the death of this year, is that here in my yard in Los Angeles I borrowed a wheelbarrow from Jose, bought some seeds and compost, and today since I don’t have to work I am planting my garden! This is certainly a first for me, a garden on November 5th! I saved some heirloom tomato seeds from the farmer’s market, and got some peas and greens and carrots and I’m going to do some snap beans, cucumbers and soybeans. I also put in some nasturtiums, chamomile and calendula. The days are short and the nights are cool, but it’s sunny and in the 60’s and 70’s, kind of like midsummer in Maine!, so I’m expecting these babies to get going pretty soon here. I have dirt under my fingernails and my back is kind of sore and I feel just like my old self here in Los Angeles.