Hardening off
A meditation on adaptation
… But first, a quick note of thanks to everyone who responded to “Bowing to the Bowerbird.” It makes my heart sing that the essay resonated with you. I appreciate your taking the time to let me know. I love to hear from you. If you feel so moved, please do write back to me or leave a comment on the website!
Much love,
t
A package arrives in my mailbox. It’s filled with small, white envelopes that rattle or make faint “sh”-ing sounds when I shake them. The accompanying note is addressed, “Dear Seed Lover.” It says:
Each packet contains such promise, so much food and beauty; each seed, a genetic map of parentage and all the adaptation the plant has done through time, as well as the knowledge of how to soak up water and sprout, how to send out roots that find nutrients, how to unfurl leaves which seek sunlight and photosynthesize, how to form flower heads and fruit, then come to full cycle and form seeds again.
This letter from Roberta Bailey of Fedco Seeds makes me realize I am not just learning to grow vegetables. I am entering into an initiation of the mysteries of life, adaptation, death, and life again.
To be a new gardener means I have a beginner’s mind as I approach an ancient human activity. I am entering into the stream of humans who for millennia have planted seeds, nurtured them, harvested the bounty, and saved the seeds for the next year. I am making mistakes that many other people before me probably made, and I am learning by observing, reading, and working with experienced growers. I have a million questions, and I also have some sense that I just need to be observant and attuned to the plants, and we will be ok.
Image: A tray of newly planted seeds in pots in the foreground, with a few leggy seedlings in the back.
My mother loans me her copy of Epitaph for a Peach by David Mas Masumoto. Masumoto’s lyrical vignettes track his shift from conventional to organic farming on his peach and grape farm in California. I’m particularly interested in his relationship to nature—sometimes it feels like a battle, sometimes a partnership, sometimes something in between.
One morning at the garden where I volunteer, we discover trays of newly planted squash and cucumber seeds have been dug up, half-eaten seed husks piled here and there. A family of mice have set up home in the compost heater in the greenhouse and feasted. So we plant more seeds and cover them up. The next week, there are mousetraps.
An age-old conflict: farmers battling nature for survival. As Masumoto puts it: “[I]sn’t farming a compromise with nature? The day the first farmer stopped hunting and gathering and planted a seed, the contest was begun.”
I think about how this contest has led to the monster Big Ag, with its poison pesticides and genetically engineered seeds that cannot sustain themselves over more than one season, threatening the very fundamentals of how life grows on this planet.
With my beginner’s mind, I wonder what it would mean to think about adaptation in this context. Is it possible to coexist with creatures and beings whose needs compete with ours? Can we see them not as enemies but as fellow beings who are doing what they are meant to do—live and grow and survive? Could I learn to grow food by making space for these beings, as Tammi Hartung does by growing herbs on the edges of her gardens for rabbits so they leave the rest of her plants alone?
Image: Lettuce, cucumber, tomato, spinach, basil seedlings grow in my window, under a grow light.
I am so new to all of this, so I don’t really know. But I start to extend this thinking out beyond growing things. I think about adaptation; I think about the Jungian concept of integrating the shadow. What would it mean to accept things that seem toxic or harmful as an integral part of myself and the world—to learn adapt to within this truth?
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to imply that I should gracefully accept the toxic things that people do to each other, or the systems of oppression we live within. I believe I should absolutely be working to reduce the harm I do to others, to take responsibility for the ways I perpetuate and uphold systems of oppression, and do everything I can to subvert and dismantle them.
But I also believe that even when we get Trump out of the White House, when we move away from capitalism to a more just economy, when we dismantle white supremacy and tear down the prison industrial complex, when the Earth’s temperature reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels or we narrowly manage to stabilize it—when we create this better world so many of us are creating together—we will still have our human nature. We will still have our desire to dominate, our tendency toward greed, our insecurities and fears, our strange ability to dehumanize others and cause great harm.
And so I wonder if I can find a way to understand these things as deeply part of who I am. To not externalize them onto cops or the Koch brothers or anti-abortion legislators.* What would it mean if I could really do that fully? How would I change? Would I be less likely to subconsciously feed those parts of myself and more able to nurture the parts of my humanity I cherish?
I learn about the “great oxygenation event” while listening to an episode of Bespoken Bones. I learn that about 2.45 billion years ago, blue-green algae appeared on earth and began pumping out great amounts of oxygen. This was toxic to most of the rest of the life on the planet. In the end, the beings who survived did so by adapting. They became the multicellular life forms that arethe basis of our existence: life forms that need oxygen to survive.
Like the tomato, cucumber, lettuce, and basil plants that I’m learning to grow. Like me. Like you.
I want so much to provide comfort and a perfect environment for my seedlings to thrive. But the next step in their growth cycle is to be outside for a period of time each day to “harden off.” I imagine they will wilt under the sun and their tender leaves will be tossed about in the wind. Once they’ve adapted to the dangers of the outside world, I’ll plant them in the soil. They will be stronger and more able to withstand the elements because of the period of discomfort and the adaptations they learned.
Perhaps these times we are living through are an opportunity for humans to harden off. To see clearly and feel deeply all the ways that we have built systems that intentionally harm people and destroy our world in order to concentrate power in the hands of a few. Right now, we are being tossed about in the winds of these times; we are wilting under the heat of terror and rage. Do we surrender, do we match hate with hate? Or do we adapt, incorporate what we learn, and become stronger?
I open the chapter on “intentional adaptation” in adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy and read a quote by Walidah Imarisha : “We will face social and political storms we could not even imagine. The question becomes not just how do we survive them, but how do we prepare so when we do suddenly find ourselves in the midst of an unexpected onslaught, we can capture the potential, the possibilities inherent in the chaos, and ride it like dawn skimming the horizon?"
Perhaps hardening off—while keeping our hearts open and soft—is how we prepare for the storms that are coming our way.
Image: Taller, leafier plants from the previous photos, ready to be hardened off.
Prompting
To use in journaling, writing, meditating, tarot pulling, etc.
Whether you are a seasoned tarot reader or have never looked at a tarot deck before, take a few minutes to meditate on this image.
Image: The nine of swords from the Smith Rider Waite deck. A person sits up in bed, head in hand. Nine swords hang over them.
What are the fearsome swords that hang above you? What would happen if you took your head out of your hands and faced them?
If you can, write a love note, love poem, love song to those swords. And if you can’t, write a love note to yourself for looking clearly at those swords.
Engaging
What else I’m reading/listening to/thinking about:
This summer, I turn 45(!). The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker is helping me plan what I hope will be a meaningful and beautiful celebration of community and action. (Side note: I learned that Parker is married to Anand Giridharadas whose book Winners Take All I appreciated for its investigation into how today’s capitalism makes people feel good about doing “social good” work that actually just perpetuates our broken systems.)
I was delighted to reconnect with Susan Raffo’s deeply considered ideas while listening to the podcast Fortification. She speaks brilliantly with host Caitlin Breedlove on the body, trauma, whiteness, the hyper-local, and so much more.
Leah Penniman’s beautiful article, “By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves,” explores the sacred connection Black folks have had to soil and how this connection was severed by colonization and enslavement. Her book Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land is on my “to-read” list.
*I’m posting this just a few days after Alabama passed its abortion ban. It’s the latest attack on the rights and self-determination of women, gender nonconforming folks, transmen, and anyone else who might get pregnant. I want to uplift here the work of reproductive justice organization SisterSong, the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Alabama-based The Yellowhammer Fund. Check them out and donate if you can.