Watching the light

Accepting what we can and cannot grow, after grief clears the ground

I've been helping people learn how to garden for several years now, and teaching them to “watch the light” is always among the first lessons I offer. It’s something gardeners do long before we put our hands in the dirt of an unfamiliar place. It’s also a practice that has served me well in seasons of grief, which raze your previous life plans to the ground, forcing you to begin again. 

The light in my back garden at noon.

Skillful gardeners don’t just stick their shovels in any old patch of soil without a plan. They watch the light for a week, a month, or maybe more, during this time of year, mapping the bright spots, and the dark ones. They walk the perimeter, push fingers into the still-frozen mud. In time, you begin to see: Here are the corners of your garden that are ready for something new to begin. Here are the places where you’ll need a year or more of weeding and compost before anything else can come up. There’s no rushing it; the waiting will be the fertilizer.

Only then do you think about the seeds you’re dreaming of sowing. A fern needs a bit of darkness, a mossy sort of moisture, an atmosphere of benign neglect. A head of lettuce will do just fine under a stand of trees; it’ll wilt on too warm a doorstep. But a sunflower, of course, needs the fullest of full sun, and nothing less will do. You think: Am I being honest with myself about what can grow here? 

Watching the light will always show you what is true.

I’ll see you on the dark side of this cliff, ferns.

There is instinct there for me in this careful watching, and lineage. My father is an environmental activist and a former landscaper; his father was a farmer’s son and a mapmaker. My mother’s father worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, monitoring the condition of the waterways in Western New York through seasons of sun and snow. My grandmothers worked with the land and the light in a much less macro way: one was a passionate painter of flowers, and the other worked directly with daffodils and tulips, planting them in swirls of technicolor hues in the sunnier spots of her garden. Some of my earliest memories are memories of touch- and color-hunger, satisfied alongside them: tracing the topological maps in my grandparents’ study, running my hand along the soft hyacinths in the bathroom vase. These early apprenticeships in light and land taught me that nothing of beauty can grow alone. 

As a reporter, an environmental educator, and avid traveler, I’ve also gotten to know many farmers, brewers and chefs—walking up the hills of vineyards in Spain, along the edges of rooftop gardens in Brooklyn, and down the sloping shores of the Finger Lakes, often with a glass in one hand and a camera in the other. Glamorous sometimes, sure, but humbling too. People in these professions know all too well that you can devote your whole being to getting something to grow, and yet you are not the one who decides whether it survives.

I have also learned from my own disasters, to look before I plant. In jobs, in relationships, in creative endeavors, and in gardens, I can be enthusiastic to a fault, as any of my loved ones will tell you. My record is stained with many a wilting and rotting that might have been avoided. It is often only in retrospect that I realize that the timing and light weren’t right from the start.

To be clear, though, I don’t believe that grief and failure only arrive when we’re in need of a hard-knock lesson. Or that they only befall the ignorant, the lost, the stubborn and the confused. I believe that darkness, death and decay fall over every life, eventually, as impersonally as the sun does in its inexorable cycles. What I mean is that disasters have taught me to pause long enough to discern which kind of cycle I am in. Those who believe that wilting and rot can be side-stepped entirely, with enough careful planning, have never kept a garden.

Watching where the light falls on Mesa Farm, in Caineville, UT

Asking myself “where is the light?” has helped me to orient myself in times when I am not sure where I am. When we lost our daughter-to-be in late pregnancy, last winter, for example, it was difficult to know what to do next. Everything that we were thinking and planning–the thoughts of where our son would sleep once the new baby came, whether we would change my office or my husband’s office into a nursery, whether we would keep our sitter or I would stay home–became irrelevant. All of our maps, suddenly as outdated as the one bearing the letters USSR that once hung in my grandparents’ old house. 

After that loss, there dawned on us a clarity we never wanted. We saw what was true: Here is where your support network is strong and can hold you, where there’s enough sunlight to start again. Here, sadly, are the shady spots, the places where rot had already begun to eat through the boards holding you up. Here are the dark corners where things won’t grow, no matter how much effort you put in, because the light's just not right.

---

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

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After last year’s loss, my husband and I started to make a list of the places in our lives where the light remained. The list begged the question, well-known in Zen Buddhism: if death is certain and time of death is uncertain, what do you want to do? Or, as Mary Oliver famously has it: what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?

These are the things that brought us the most light: 

1. Our son. I loved being around him, even and especially in grief. He was a reminder of what was still good about the world. 

2. Each other. Losing a child or pregnancy is often hard on a marriage. David Kessler talks about this as a time when both people are drowning, and there’s no one on shore to pull them out. But somehow, with help from our networks of care, we kept each other and ourselves afloat. 

3. Travel. As vaccines became more widely available, especially for our son, we knew we were ready to see new places, as well as old friends we had been missing since lockdown.

4. Home. As we traveled, we came to appreciate our own four walls in a new way. We wanted more warmth and comfort, and a place in which to welcome other travelers. We tried to break our habit of endlessly overthinking about whether we should buy this couch or that couch. Life is short, let’s get the green one!

5. Time in nature. Last week, I wrote about the benefits of simply walking in nature for the traumatized nervous system. I knew I needed more of this medicine in the coming months. 

6. Exercise. In grief, endorphins are not a nice-to-have; they’re a need-to-have. The data bears this out, but we also know this intuitively. For my husband, this means weight-lifting at our local gym. For me, this means walking or biking–in nature, ideally, but I also push myself to log miles on my cheapo exercise bike or walking desk treadmill on colder days, purely for the mental health benefits. 

7. Cooking. For myself, for others. Regularly. Nothing complicated. This was a huge part of my identity before my family building journey took over my life (I once wrote a 400-page viral grad school thesis on it, if such things can ever be said to be viral). I felt it was time to get back to it. 

8. Friends. Particularly those who were also taking, as I call it, “the scenic route to family-building.” By this, I mean, finding the family that’s right for them, even if it meant tossing the typical love-marriage-baby-carriage trajectory. For some, this meant sharing their stories of living child-free, coming out as queer, finalizing a divorce and beginning to date, or exploring ethical non-monogamy. For others, it meant figuring out how to freeze their eggs, considering adoption, or nursing the wounds of infertility and/or pregnancy loss alongside us.

9. Writing. I’ve been journaling since I was very small. I re-started a Morning Pages routine at some point in the last year, and it has enriched my life in countless ways. As has this project.

10. Teaching. I love what I do, and can’t wait to continue in a few new formats in the coming months. (I’ll see some of you on March 23 for my next class – details below!) 

The afternoon light outside of our house

Our “watching the light” list helped us determine the “next right thing,” in a reality that still felt deeply wrong. It prompted us to change our RSVP from “no” to “yes” for a wedding in a beautiful place, so that we could drive through fire-ruined forests along the California coast with the radio cranked up loud, watching the new green growth come in. We took our son to his first two music festivals, because we all love singing loudly and badly outside. We rented a caretaker’s cottage by the ocean so that we could walk to the free local beach, then spend long lazy mornings collecting empty shells, admiring the beauty that loss leaves behind.

While we stopped really believing in “plans,” we did begin to set more long-term intentions, as we were ready. To dream of a life in which we spent more time with the things on our list, and spent less time at work. The paradox of loss is that more than anything else, it gives you permission to reach for joy. 

At the same time, we came to accept that some parts of our life might lie fallow for a while, or forever. We didn't have the energy to keep planting seeds in the shadier spots–the attempts to save or by saved by people that were never going to come to fruition. The paradox of joy is that in reaching for it, you often have to be willing to let drop what you’re already holding. 

This new life that we built in the ashes of the old one, after spending long months watching the light – it is a good life. I would still gladly take the other one. The one in which I spent my spring preparing for a healthy baby to come, a summer holding her in my arms, a fall watching her delight in her first bites of food from our garden, a winter spent snuggling her close to my body. 

Instead, I have a different, wilder, still-precious life. One that’s built around the light that was already there, and that remains here still. 

NOTES: 

• Heather Havrilesky (AKA

  Ask Polly
  ) gives similar advice to a 28-year-old living with liminality in her latest column (which has also brought me joy for many years), writing, “All that matters is that you say to yourself, I don’t always love you, but I will give you what you need to thrive.”

• David Kessler’s interview with Brene Brown helped me to see how best to nourish my relationship after our shared loss. Kessler, one of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s main collaborators on grief theory, lost a child and talks through what it took for him and his wife to heal – in a decidedly non-linear way. 

• Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages have offered many people a path to watching the light in their lives. If you, like me, find yourself struggling often to figure out the “next right thing,” you could do worse than penning three pages of absolute garbage every morning, without needing to make it into art. (Though it might become that, later.) 

• Esmé Weijun Wang, who has battled her way through chronic illness and is currently supporting her partner with a bone marrow cancer diagnosis, knows from grief and reaching for joy. She is offering an upcoming class on nonfiction writing. Check it out here.

• Sometimes, watching the light isn’t possible, and it’s important to just watch the lack thereof for a while instead.

  Liz Medford
  wrote about this in a way that resonated with me this week. 

  How about you, friends? Where is the light falling in your life right now? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. And please, feel free to share this post with someone who may be in need of a little light right now. I’d love to hear from them too.