One of my favorite books I read last year was Epitaph for a Peach by David Masumoto, a memoir by a peach farmer in Fresno as he rehabilitated the land that he had acquired. I had never thought about it before, but the rising popularity of organic food means that much of this needs to be grown on land that has endured years or decades of pesticides. In the book, Masumoto describes growing onions, not to harvest and eat but to let decay back into the ground so that they can slowly break apart the toxins and bring life back to the soil.
One of the things I’ve learned to love about winter is being surrounded by trees and plants that would appear to be dead and wilted if it weren’t for the fact that we know that by spring they’ll be flourishing again. Here in D.C. the weather can be volatile, and sometimes a spell of warmth will strike through the city, only to be followed by a snow storm. While it is still winter, any buds that dare to emerge will be frozen over, never reaching full blossom.
I’ve found these winters to be the best time for writing like this. The habit is easy to keep up when it’s cold and dark outside, and the human world is still ramping up for the year ahead. So does that mean writing for me is seasonal? I’ve proven to myself time and again that it doesn’t take much for the words to start coming back out again, but each time I fall off the wagon it seems so daunting to get back on. I doubt that I’ll be able to do it again each time, not realizing that the rubric that I measured myself with previously might not be the same now. With the imagination, there is no standard measurement.
In the spring, when life resurfaces and daily demands are higher, it gets harder and harder to convince myself that writing daily like this is “productive.” But when I look back at the last few years, it’s not the periods where I lapsed in output that I’m tempted to wish I could redo. It’s actually the opposite – the times when I was so focused on delivering some kind of product to the world, that I didn’t start the day making sure that the ground I was standing on was nourishing rather than toxic. It’s become clear to me that mornings are for planting onions. I’m giving myself permission to keep this going year-round.