Leave it in the ground
A friend says that the method of the primary school is to plant the seeds of learning in the kids and then pull them up after two days to check if the seeds have grown properly.
Some things need stay in the ground for a while nurtured by trust. But that is not how we do it. “You are either in or out” as they say.
The western secularized culture places enormous emphasize on what is visible and tangible and valuing it as understandable. To make sense is the best you can do.
Invisible means less or no value. At the same time, most of us know from lived experience and the natural world around and inside us that some things take time.
Some things have their own clock, sometimes predictable like a kid being born nine – ish months after being conceived, and some things not - like when deep grief suddenly loosens its grip for a bit, and you wake up without tears and just listen to a bird outside the window and feel something delicate and fragile and maybe its hope.
Learning happens partly over ground – like making the sounds of the letters and following the mysterious signs with the tip of your fingers and then suddenly mastering a language. I remember clearly being on a bus and looking out the window, seeing a store fore men’s clothing and suddenly reading the name of it loud.
I surprised myself and my parents. Becoming a reader.
Practice makes, if not perfect, some things possible that can only become possible through stubborness over and over again.
Some pieces of information can be delivered and received in neat little packages and placed in the perfect spot in the mind to complete something.
But most things of value happen underground, somewhere where you can feel its. movements, but you don’t know yet exactly what it is or what the implications of its existence will be.
To grow things underground is not the same as leaving it unattended, you water seeds even if you don’t see them in the ground. There is a care to nurturing that which is yet out of sight.
Not all seeds are planted with intention, things grow in us that flew in from somewhere else or were planted by someone else with less care and more demands.
But if you can, you take care what you plant, and you take care how you feed it and shelter it when the first tendrils break the soil. And when you want to rip it out still raw, into the light, you stop yourself, breath – and wait.
My wish is for more organizations to have spaces where you ask each other:
What do you need to plant? (I would like to plant this question in my practice and see what happens. I would like to plant a practice of a different kind of learning – juggling, classic Greek- and see where it takes me.)
What are you not ready to pull out of the ground?
How does it feel down there in the deep soil? Are there seeds that are painful, sticky, forever in the ground refusing to break the surface?
Is there something begging for more or different nurturing?
On my nightstands;
“Translating Myself and Others” Jhumpa Lahiri
“The Fateful Triangle; Race Ethnicity Nation”
Stuart Hall
“ArtMonsters; Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art”
Lauren Elkin
