The Beauty of Fading

When evolving we must let go of what was in order to make room for what lies ahead of us.

A little note for Summer here: I have been a little quieter with my weekly newsletter. Summer and this season are busy for me with work. I find plenty of writing inspiration but little room to do the writing time as a mom and business owner this season. Your support for this space and patience don’t go unnoticed. The Summer Guide is live for all paying subscribers. I appreciate your support. Autumn will find me at a different place with this space, I have no doubt.

Just this week the cool air brought in the Sturgeon Moon over the hills of Leelanau County. This is a critical moment in our season. The rivers turn. The salmon begin moving from deep water and soon up the rivers to lay eggs. When you live in a seasonal place, especially amongst the land, it is hard to ignore the rhythms. They become guideposts to identify the shifts that are both coming and inevitable.

This summer, I haven’t had a lot of time to just be. There is always something right now, but in the rather full schedule of kids, work, and just managing life, I have stood amongst the growing flowers and counted the colors of this season as if they have something profound to tell me. I have soaked in the humidity of the lake on a windy moody day into my skin and marveled at how it made every cell in me feel alive. I have been mystified by how the water looks like silk for a certain time of day that continually becomes sooner and sooner as the days carry us closer to fall. Even in a state of abundance, I have caught myself absorbing the layers of rainbow tones of every color, the sounds and how they shift, the flavors and how they ripen and deepen as summer progresses, and most of all I have found myself falling in love with the textures of everything. I sit for just a moment at the end of the day in the fading light on these now evidently final weeks of summer just feeling the immensity of abundance in this season. There is much to distract me from seeing it, but it feels precious the older I become.

As the cool air settles in for just a moment, reminding us all of the eventual end of these abundant days that leave the tension on the edge of our cup nearly (or sometimes completely) spilling over, I sense that the beauty of this moment in the year is being on just the cusp of the evidence of the fading.

I ripped out the squash this week. Demolished by vine borers and given to the chickens to navigate for lunch, the fading there was clear, but as the tomatoes set their fruit it can feel as if they are far from fading. The thing is though the setting of fruit is the sign of the end. We celebrate the production it makes even though the plant tells us its time is nearly passed.

These things sit with me and teach me much about how important it is to savor life, look closely, slow down, feel the depth of longing, and let something know how much I love it.

This season in the garden has been a complicated one for many reasons. This year as I was setting a new fence I learned somehow I had placed our food garden over our leach field from our septic system. It may be one of the most embarrassing things to admit as a professional in the field, but when I set to create that garden I was 4 months postpartum and at the height of a pandemic where my whole world felt upside down so some details in life were missed. I nearly thought I wouldn’t say anything, but the truth is I think life is about messing up and learning. Sometimes we just have some oversights in life.

Finding this out left a deep sadness in me most of the summer. This garden that was thriving the best it ever had and that I had worked SO much to bring into fruition, no longer felt like a place I wanted to cultivate or care for. It felt like a confirmation of all the imposter syndrome in my head while I was starting a new business this year. I stood there and felt I had failed as I picked tomatoes and handed them to the chickens because well now I knowingly am putting myself at risk instead of naively doing so, but the chickens can enjoy them at least.

The truth of the matter is that the whole garden will probably be dug up this fall. We have to add an addition to our septic tanks (joys of rural life) and that area is most likely where they will be added. The soil will be ripped out that I spent time cultivating and I will have to reconsider it all. In some ways, I see it as a gift, but I won’t lie that I also have felt the sense of failure in it.

This will be our sole garden next year. Our other garden is the one that is shifting

I don’t know what the garden will be like in the coming year. Maybe something or maybe nothing. I don’t know, but I realized how much it has held me, given me purpose, and taught me in the last 4 years I have poured into it. I rediscovered my passion and love for gardening and working with the earth in those beds. I learned how bad soil can be turned into thriving soil. Those days tending to this space gave me purpose while I navigated finding myself again after having my kids and it brought me to a place where I had the confidence to pursue a new career and evolution of myself. Even in my deep love of this soil that holds my sweat and tears (literally), I know this space has served me. It has given me what it needed to and just like many parts in my life there needs to come a time of evolution. This isn’t a failure just a turning point of learning, growing, and turning the page to a new chapter.

Part of aging is discarding. Part of evolving is letting go of what was. We cannot carry all the same things we held from one chapter into the next. I keep thinking about that as I still now tend to the tomatoes as if they will be ours and not just the chickens. I know that that chapter I was in is still very much still there in me. I know it will pass along with the falling leaves this year or when the chickens get to enter the garden to let it be demolished by them before the excavator digs its teeth in.

For now, I want to keep tending to it till I know I can’t. I still have pangs of sadness wandering the rows where the perfect onions have grown and the tulsi is flowering. I feel it all at times pretty deeply, but there is also this gift knowing something you are tending is the last time you will. Knowing that next year we will figure something else out and once again life will be just that much more different. Knowing that what isn’t need tending in this soil will allow me to tend to other places.

I find this theme in many parts of my life right now. The kids shifting schools. Not teaching gardening this year. My career looking different while asking myself how I stay on course with my dreams and not be lured by other things. How I have let go of my old career fully in the last year. The kids going to school 5 days a week this year. A new puppy. The list is honestly quite endless in all the ways I am finding myself discarding one thing and filling it slowly with another. The garden will be no different.

So much has changed in life since snapping this photo last October. All our chickens passed and so did our golden. Now we have a new set of hens and a new pup along with a new front fence and so much more around here. It’s wild to me when I see this photo.

This summer I had such different expectations for how everything would work with my garden and life. I had different ideas of what was possible to hold and had no idea what needed releasing in this time of evolution, but now, I see it far more clearly. Some of that is sad, but some of it is a relief to know that once honestly felt like too much was simply the universe preparing me to let something find a new path. It’s a lesson I am learning to see and hear more clearly these days sometimes with grace and sometimes without, but that isn’t the part I need to be too serious about in this process. Instead, it is about seeing how letting go of what no longer is serving me in the chapter I am evolving into is how I will reach in the direction I hope to find myself as I grow older year over year. Just like the plants that let their bottom leaves die to bring energy to their new ones, I am not different.

---

On my mind this week

Been one hella busy week around here, but life is full and good in the best ways: