The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. It’s a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses; it’s about winning, about providing society with superior things, and about proving that you have taste and good values and you work hard. And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is—because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph—and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it. What a great metaphor!
A friend recommended Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird [Kindle]. It had a cute title and seemed a quick read and was about the life and advice of a successful writer, so I read it. I confess, I had to grind to finish the book. I just wanted her to tell me how to be a better writer. Semicolons or no. When to use adverbs if at all. How to start and finish a short story.
Instead, she wanted to use writing as a metaphor and a gateway to explore the more important issues, of family and loss and struggle. I was too impatient. Maybe that’s her point. Just take it bird by bird, right.
Apparently the book has quite a cult following. I found the above passage glowingly quoted in another book (I forget which one, sorry). And then the flashbacks came, of Anne’s wonderful writing, of the neat little images she painted into my mind’s eye. Her voice really is unique. Part of me suspects that when I reread the book in a few years, maybe sooner, it will be like seeing a casual friend after many years. And who knows, times have changed. Maybe we can become great friends now.