Further Adventures In Wu Wei, Fungus, And Whale Poo

Last month I sang the praises of turning tail and running the other way the moment the going gets tough.

Okay, not exactly. Oversimplification. More like the praises of putting a troublesome project on hold while you wander off for an indeterminate period, doing other things, new things, shiny things, so you can later return to whatever you left in the back of the refrigerator and, one hopes, approach it anew, a beneficiary of the unavoidable mental rewiring you’ve received in the interim. The key is neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its neurons and their networks in response to new experiences.

I also remarked that this strategy seemed more likely to receive an unqualified embrace by the Eastern mindset, rather than the relentlessly goal-addicted Western mind. As if deliberately given an object lesson in inaction, not two days after I posted the essay, I blundered, without looking for it, across the Chinese Taoist term for the very concept I was molesting with my thoroughly Western vocabulary: wu wei, which in essence means to do by not doing.

This is not at all the same thing as doing nothing. One commentary I looked at gave a thumbnail sketch of wu wei as taking the right action at the proper time to allow what is to be, to be.

How, though, do we know what the right action is? Please be kind enough to share if you ever learn how to lock that down beyond all doubt. For now, I’m satisfied with this: You’ll know it when you feel it, a gut-level impulse that overrides anything the analytical mind can hurl at it.

November’s was my first Unplugged since last winter, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stepped out for several months of walkabout. There are times when one of life’s greatest necessities is to clear part of it aside to make room for other things, new things, shiny things. Which can turn into high-grade ore for writers. New experiences have a way of adding their own unique shadings to new work, or stalled work, or work-in-prolonged-progress, like a novel whose beginning and end are separated by seasons. They can unlock doors to formerly undiscovered wings in the houses of words we build, and open windows into characters who have coyly eluded us, and it may only be later that we recognize how the pieces of life-as-lived and tale-as-told fit together.

I dashed off a quick list of a few things I’d done since last we met here, none of which I’d ever done before, and indicated that one of them was already paying dividends in the word trade.

It was this one:

Planned, planted, and tended a vegetable garden.

These dividends were not by design. They just happened, the organic by-product of a gut-level impulse.

I must first confess that I’m one of those freaks who don’t like summer, at least not since I graduated college and summer quit meaning three months off. As sand and waves are to the immortal Jeff Spicoli, so to me are snow and ice and all things winter, with the possible exception of hypothermia. Yet this year kindled a passionate new love affair with summer.

Gardening. Right. I approached it with lots of doing by actively doing. Began studying a manual in February. Plotted out the arrangement on graph paper, at a scale of 4 inches per square — three anal-retentive drafts of this. By the last frost date in May, every seed and nursery plant was ready. It was a rousing success. Righteous eats all around.

Except, proving that the Divine Comedy is still in full swing, we had the shortest, coldest, wettest growing season on record. It was the non-summer I’d always dreamed about and never gotten. Now it was here and wreaking unholy havoc.

It forced me to wage a constant battle against Septoria Leaf Spot — a fungus that adores cool, wet conditions — for the soul of the tomatoes. The Powdery Mildew made far quicker casualties of the squash, although this happened late, after I’d already discovered why, past a certain point in the season, you can hardly give squash away. Two artillery barrages of hail in late July. Glaciers and a mammoth stampede, too, although I might have only imagined those.

It all came to a screeching white halt with back-to-back snows when we were barely into the second week of October. In advance of the killing frosts I rescued between 200 and 300 green tomatoes that hadn’t had a chance to ripen on the vine. I boxed the mature ones with bananas, like ship’s passengers crowded into steerage, and they all eventually turned a triumphant red. The immature ones found their way into the alternate-lifestyle sleaze of a green tomato relish.

And I loved it. The whole process, from sod-busting to harvest. Every day I loved it. Except for fertilizing with fish emulsion, the most vile substance you can legally buy on the open market. Never encountered it? Think Moby Dick suffering severe gastrointestinal distress after getting food poisoning from two tons of fish tacos.

I know, I know … none of this sounds like it has anything remotely to do with writing. For most people, most projects, it wouldn’t. But for myself, and my current opus-in-progress, I beg to differ.

It’s a long, complicated thing set centuries before such institutions as the factory farms that keep most of us several steps removed from what ends up on our plate. Its characters, many of them, are agrarian folk, or otherwise depend directly upon them. If it doesn’t get grown, it doesn’t get eaten. There are no Whole Foods stores around to pick up the slack.

They’re aliens, to a degree, the way people of a different time and/or place will always be. But after not quite five months of planning, planting, and tending, I’ve found one more patch of common ground with them, and can empathize with them a little more deeply.

I relate, now, to their daily obsession with the sky, because I’ve shared it, with an active stake in it, attuned to the weather in ways I never had been. Too much rain, or not enough. Waiting on a stubborn sun. And I’ve tasted their fears of failure. Felt hail hitting me in the face, not caring about the sting, only what it might be doing to tender leaves and stems. Felt my heart sink at the discovery of disease and made it a mortal enemy.

I’ve watched with delight as pale green shoots shouldered their way up through the soil to unfurl their first fingernail-sized leaves. Felt pride in standing beside cornstalks that towered two heads above me, and worried over them like broken-legged horses as I righted them and braced them after a windstorm roared down from the mountains and knocked them over like bowling pins.

I ate and shared and traded. Sought advice and offered up a couple discoveries of my own, part of a community of people both different and the same, all of us trying to get it as right as we could and storing up lessons for next time.

Now. Tell me: How could I have gotten all that, for my own book, from somebody else’s? How could I have absorbed all that if I hadn’t lived it, had it wired into me, heart and neuron?

These people I meet across the centuries, also both different and the same … I love them that much more now, for their tenacity and faith and determination. The food was the ground’s gift to me. Growing it became my gift to them.

We’re all richer for it.

And we can’t wait for next year.