Tag Archives: new year’s resolutions

What Breaks Open the Seed

“Nature reinvents itself over and over again. This process of constant creation leaves behind a track record of successes and failures, new life forms that live or die depending on their innate genetic flexibility, their ability to find and fit into their own niche. This learning to live with others may take seconds or years or millennia.” – Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, 41

A second year in Indiana has not prepared me for how startling winter is in the forests, how completely the deciduous woodlands shed their leaves and transform into quiet, desolate fogs of spindly twigs. I am still too used to the coniferous evergreens of the west, where the ponderosas only shrug at the changing seasons.

I started 2024 with two goals in mind: To write more and to read more books. I didn’t keep track of these goals, of course. Famously, I dislike quantifying previous years. I’m more interested in qualitative reflections on the past. This has been a very difficult year for me for a lot of reasons; I know this year has been exceptionally horrifying for so many. A new year won’t change that. Instead, I want to attend to the quality of the days ahead, to the slowness of winter and what possibilities I can find in that slowness.

Maybe it was fitting, then, that the last book I read in 2024 was Our Green Heart, by Irish botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger, about forest ecology, Celtic history, growth, and the strangeness of forest ecosystems.

I appreciate (and am jealous of) the sense of wonder in Beresford-Kroeger’s prose. Her description of seeds was particularly striking: “Most seeds,” she writes, “carry a dormancy factor, the proteins of their endosperm food supply coiled and folded into resting states that wait for a particular signal. These signals are a form of divination, an assurance strong enough that the seed bets its future on that message. They are not properly understood in science and have not been studied in great depth” (85). Here, there is poetry in unexplained biology. Some seeds evolved to sprout in reaction to heat from wildfires; others evolved to travel far distances, to be eaten and carried off by birds and rodents. Dormant seeds are hard and singular for months or years until the right external prompt cracks them open and they grow into roots, trunks, branches.

When I teach, I emphasize revision as the more important process in writing, more than drafting or research. Recently, I have brought in a novel-revising technique from Jane Smiley’s notion that sentences are either seeds or pebbles. Matt Bell elaborates on this idea in his craft book Refuse to be Done, writing that “If it’s a pebble, it’s just the next sentence and it sits there. But if it’s a seed it grows into something that becomes an important part of the life of the novel. The problem is, you can’t know ahead of time whether a sentence will be a seed or a pebble, or how important a seed is going to be” (Bell 77).

I’ve never before thought of this exercise as an exploration of dormancy. If a sentence, a paragraph, or even an unspoken idea is a seed, that means it is awaiting something external to activate it, to bring it out of its shell. This is not that far from artistic inspiration, almost all of which, I believe, comes from external experience: long walks, a healthy community, traveling someplace new, the changing seasons. At least, these are the things that put me in a writing mood. It’s true that when I’m writing, I never know which ideas will take root and grow. Maybe all writing is secretly fertile in this way.

This past year has felt thoroughly dormant, but this is also normal for me. I live in a shell that I rarely come out of, and for such painfully long periods of time that I think dormancy is my natural state. But I have also been rootless for a decade now, following grad school programs and jobs from town to town, leaving behind friends and family for other valleys. What spark am I waiting for? What divination will finally break me open?

Beresford-Kroeger also finds comfort in the secret and illegal hedge schools that existed in Ireland for “those five hundred years during which the Penal Laws made it illegal for the Irish to teach their children” (35). She describes one school as having been nestled in the wilderness, protected by the landscape. It is partly through these hedge schools that Irish language and culture were passed on from generation to generation, where old knowledge was stored, sustained, kept safe like the dormant trees preserved within seeds. These secret schools were a long-standing form of resistance to the occupying British colonists, who could not stamp out Irish identity through force or erasure, an important lesson for the coming year.

Maybe I’ll take this to heart: Dormancy is protective, not restrictive. In writing, this is true of the stories we want to tell and those that need more time.

In the town I grew up, at a museum of regional history, there happened to be a poetry display I had the privilege of visiting last week. A local poet had her typewriter stationed there, along with post cards, paperclips, fancy paper. When she offered to write me a poem, the prompt I gave was full of the obvious cliches: a new year, getting back into a healthy routine, trying to break out of a sense of stagnation. The poem, of course, was much more thoughtful than my jumbled words. The museum display was full of poems commemorating the beauty of the Coconino National Forest, the huge and ancestral evergreens that loom over my hometown.

This year, I intend to slow down, take my time, pay attention. I don’t want to toss out any seeds thinking they’re only pebbles. I don’t think there’s a magical break between one year and the next, but I do think growth continues, even if that growth only takes the form of preservation. Eventually, once winter has stayed its welcome, the spindly, empty trees in Indiana will sprout their leaves again.

Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Revise a Novel in Three Drafts. Soho Press, 2022.

Beresford-Kroeger, Diana. Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests. Random House Canada, 2024.

Year-End Celebratory Broth

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“On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” -Melissa Febos

Since moving to southern Indiana in August, I’ve kept the refuse from the produce I cook with, storing it in plastic cubes in my freezer. For four months, I added skins, stems, and seeds to the stockpile, until yesterday, when I emptied the freezer-burned garbage into a pot of water, sprinkling in peppercorns and cooking over medium heat to make, approximately, a month’s worth of vegetable broth.

Stock and broth can be used interchangeably when discussing vegetables, but I prefer broth because it describes the process, stemming from the Germanic bru, itself the origin of brewing. That process demands patience. Broth is versatile, a necessary part of soup but useful for plenty of other dishes.

But the main reason I make broth is to repurpose produce that I would normally throw in the garbage. The thawing mess is a grafted-together pile of compost: onion skins, carrot ends, sprigs of parsley I couldn’t find a use for, the top of a butternut squash, the seeds of a bell pepper, wrinkly garlic cloves, kale stems, squeezed lemon rinds, half a jalapeno, tomato innards, stray mushrooms, apple cores. Summer into fall into winter, cooked for hours into a liquid the color of Irish breakfast tea.

The nutrients in vegetable skins and stems are locked within unpalatable textures and disquieting flavors. Cooking broth is a way of transforming endings into beginnings, or at least the beginning of another meal, a way of expanding limits.

What have I accumulated this year that I can’t stomach? How can I be resourceful with the loneliness and anxiety I’ve kept hidden away, shoved deep in the cold parts? What dormant memories can I distill to warm me for the winter? Here at the beginning of 2024, in looking back, I really don’t have much to work with. I am at the cutting board again, still hungry for a better world.

Kristine Langley Mahler writes that the “ending of every essay is the same ending of every heavily weighted moment: a return to routine with the incredulity that life goes on, as boring and insultingly indifferent as the moment before the change began. It is not a literary trick to revert to banality as much as it is an acknowledgment that epochs end without fanfare; they begin without obviousness; we are meant to pay attention all the time” (27).

Generally, I dislike New Year resolutions. Spring and fall present more obvious opportunities to measure change, but winter is a dormant period. We’re meant to slow down this time of year, stay together, stick to our routines and cook the apples and squash we accumulated during the harvest. This is, of course, an extremely limited experience with seasons, true to just a handful of ecosystems, and even here, in so many thick, leafless forests on the Ohio River, seasons are becoming, if nothing else, false expectations.

The end of predictable seasons has been on my mind all year, but especially this month because I’ve been reading C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, a near-future dystopian novel about a professional chef wrestling with her ambitions after a sun-blotting smog causes most crops to go extinct. Shortly after she is hired by an enormously wealthy financier to cook elaborate meals at his private estate, to woo scientists and technologists over the long-gone cuisines of their childhoods, the narrator discovers that her taste in organic produce has vanished after years of flavorless, extinction-resistant monocrops:

“After tasting from my employer’s menu, guts roiling with cream and questions of my future, I found myself craving a dab, a pinch, just a soupcon of mung-protein flour. That metallic tang, like medicine. Without my knowing, it had gotten familiar—a link, as I floated alone through days of terrifying uncertain abundance, to the world of gray plates and empty shelves, of starving children in Louisville and Addis Ababa. I imagined small faces pressed against the glass as they watched me throw out pounds of pommes dauphine. The sameness of the smog, it occurred to me, had also felt safe: it was unchanging” (20).

This metallic tang of gray sameness resonates with me. I’ve gotten comfortable in a sick abundance of distractions, screens, voices. So many of the experiences I’ve accumulated have been blandly scripted, redundant, disposable. Lately, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve forgotten that life isn’t meant to be a numb replication of itself.

My disdain for the Gregorian calendar, rigid and anticlimactic, likely has more to do with my disdain for quantification. I understand the impulse to number one’s achievements at the end of the year, to tally up pages written, books read, publications, rejections. But a fixation on numbers, to me, is unappetizingly stale. I don’t remember the meals I cooked in August, or September, or October. I didn’t keep track of new recipes, numbers of ingredients, nutrient totals. What I know is that the broth I cooked from those meals’ residue is layered, unfixed, earthy the way a body is after sweating in a forest but by some miracle a tiny bit sweet.

If I’m going to look back at the year, I don’t want to measure it by numbers, but by the taste and texture of what the year has made of me. How many podcasts did I listen to? Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine, but I learned a lot more than I used to know about the history of Palestine, the politics of unionizing, drafting novels, the nervous system. I learned that Soviet science textbooks are still used in India because their tone was far less condescending than western textbooks, that Martin Luther was fond of fecal jokes, and that perfectionists tend to engage in more self-harm. I read more novels than memoirs. I got better at cooking spaghetti squash. I spent more time on trains, more time looking at rivers. I talked with different writers. I live in Indiana and I teach with more joy than I used to.

It might not be the case that writing, on its own, can shake me out of my numbness, but when Melissa Febos calls writing a life-saving practice, it gives me hope: She writes, “I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again” (151).

If writing doesn’t change the writer, how will it change the reader? Writing this ridiculous blog post after over a year of adding nothing to this silly little website has been, if nothing else, a taste-test of who I am right now.

I want a life of textures, a year of multitudes. I don’t want abundance; too many Americans have too much of that already, to the detriment of the planet. What I want is a more precise way of being. I want smaller numbers and slower minutes. I want to pay attention to everything, for attendance to become a devotion all its own.

Febos, Melissa. Body Work. Catapult, 2022.

Mahler, Kristine Langley. A Calendar is a Snakeskin. Autofocus, 2023.

Zhang, C Pam. Land of Milk and Honey. Riverhead Books, 2023.