Allowing Room for Ideas to Grow
Gardening has always been on my aspirational to-do list (along with sewing, cooking, and playing the piano), but it’s also one of those self-enrichment activities that requires actual time investment to get the most out of it. For instance, you can’t just put a seed in a pot and watch it grow into a tomato, or throw some eggs in a pan and get a soufflé. There are specific steps involved, and finding a process to remember those steps by memory, as always, takes time. I probably have the opposite of what Martha Stewart would refer to as a green thumb, and no matter how hard I try, I inevitably end up killing off the plants I receive as gifts (I’ve learned not to buy them anymore)—with the exception of succulents, which have the staying power of camels in a desert without water. I have a friend who grows herbs and vegetables like basil and tomatoes on her porch, an ingenious idea. Who wants to buy a mound of parsley in the grocery store when all most recipes call for is two tablespoons?
Creative activities like gardening can help to reinvigorate the writing process. Gardening does not happen to be one of those activities for me personally, but I have found one of the best ways to connect with my humanity as a writer is to spend time in natural environments. In cities like Los Angeles, it can be difficult to find quiet spaces to enjoy nature. They do exist, but it takes some searching to find them. After living in L.A. for over ten years, this past December, for the first time, I went to a redwood park in Northern California—the Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It was chilly, but there were also fewer tourists. Northern California has six major parks with old growth redwood trees. Old growth forests contain trees that haven’t been cut down and have been left undisturbed. According to the Save The Redwoods League, less than five percent of the old growth redwood forests in California still remain. The oldest redwoods and sequoias in those forests are up to 2,000 years old, and majestic with a presence that feels older than human nature itself.
Walking around the redwood groves, I noticed some of the trees looked as if they had faces ingrained into their bark. I have been thinking about how, as a writer, connecting with my humanity also means being able to convey other perspectives. As writers, we should care about how our writing connects with readers, even as our writing is a mode of self-expression.
When a redwood tree dies and falls to the ground in the forest, its trunk has nutrients which feed the soil beneath it, causing the growth of more trees. Sometimes new trees begin to grow out of the trunk of the fallen tree, up to four or five saplings at a time. The young trees compete with each other for the light that opens up in the grove, and the strongest among them survives. Nature has its own innate logic, both in connection to and apart from human nature.
If I could describe what a moment of clarity sounds like—when an idea I’ve been mulling over for some time finally comes together—it’s something similar to the wind whispering through the tops of the trees in a redwood grove, over three hundred feet above. Distracted by cell phone notifications, car honks, and a steady stream of white noise coming at us throughout the day, it’s often difficult to hear this sound. Some ideas are just not as strong as others to survive, to be heard, and to be understood. But that doesn’t mean weaker ideas should just be discarded. Writers are luckier than the redwood forests, in a way. We can store our weaker ideas for later in Evernote, phones, computers, or file cabinets, while allowing the stronger ones to immediately grow into essays, poems, or stories. In the meanwhile, we can keep ideas that need a little more time to nurture in the quieter, undisturbed groves of memory, with just enough light to grow. Making time for clarity—whether for you as a writer that means gardening, cooking, or taking a walk in the woods—allows room for, at the very least, one idea to reach its fullest height.
Erin Anadkat is a MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://www.erinanadkat.tumblr.com/, https://twitter.com/erinanadkat
