Week One: Plant Life. Writing.

When I was doing my "pre-planning" for this week I noticed that I was especially interested in roots. The roots are where the growth happens, where someone hunkers down and gets grounded in something. The roots are where one digs deep. The roots are in the dirt, and the dirt is where the messy stuff happens, and it is the stuff we so often try to avoid, but it's also where the nutrients are, the stuff that will ultimately be catalyzed into life force to push the plant upward.

It's not the leafy stuff that is important. In my life, I tend to want to focus on the flower, and not on the support beneath that flower, the germination, the dark, damp places where "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" (Dylan Thomas) hides out.

And what is that force? What is that primal human urge that pulls us from our beds in the morning? I'm finding that I've spent most of my life saying that "If I could just do what I wanted, then I'd be happy." I've rebelled in every possible way from the monotony and the routine, the "get up and live in such a way that you are part of a machine" stuff.

And yet, having the freedom I have now, I'm so often struck by--terror. Living on autopilot made it easier for me to not examine what that "force that through the green fuse drives the flower" was all about. Living on autopilot made it simpler. Having to ask that question--because it essentially gets down to "What am I living for? What do I wake up for each day?"--is scary.

I am alive because of the dirt, the muck, the roots that have so firmly grounded me, now. I am alive not because of the pretty foliage that I have put on display, but because there is something enlivening about getting down on my hands and knees and playing in the dirt. Potting something. Getting messy. Watching what shoots up.