Garden Time (part 3)
Over the winter I made the shape of the garden on paper, again and again. Planning the garden means holding multiple years in the mind all at once, and I find this disorienting. I draw many versions: to test the tension of the space in accommodating the idea, to remind me about it later, to ignore it all and improvise abruptly. Now, the garden in real life is recognisable from the one in pencil. There are brick paths through the beds and young trees in the actual ground. The rain barrel (a dream so many years in waiting) is full of rain water. On the windowsill, kale and lettuce and tomatoes are germinating. The rhubarb is many fat stems of hot pink and muddy green. There is a feeling in my body of heavy correctness. Like when we’ve done the grocery shopping and it feels good to be stocked up. I feel, increasingly, stocked up. I feel, increasingly, that this ballast of correctness validates everything I ever longed for, and wondered why I should long for it, and where does that longing come from in the body. Here is where that longing comes from: in the joy of having enough, in the joy of knowing the body in the context of a safe place.
A couple months ago, I came across an essay on gardening in Ross Gay’s newest book Inciting Joy:
“Gardens and joy, the question understands, are privileges. Great point, and one thing I want to be cautious of—by which I really mean refuse—are the ways we sometimes consider, for instance, gardening (or health or healthcare or potable water or clean air or pleasant and stable housing [etc]) a privilege, which actually obscures the fact that to be without a garden, or to be without green space, or to be without access to a park or clean water or the forest or fruit trees or birdsong or shade or a deep and abiding relationship to a tree, or to be without healthcare, and so often to be without health, is violence, it is abnormal, (even if it is the norm), and it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural.”
To be without a garden is violence, it is abnormal, it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural. I know I say this all the time; everyone I follow says it too. We say it over and over, but maybe we say it softened sometimes, because we are tired and it feels very obvious. We say it with generalities: access to “green space”, rather than the more specific garden. It moved me to read Gay say this so explicitly. It moved me to feel permitted to simultaneously mourn and celebrate that having access to this garden now may directly provide me with access to other things that have felt, perversely, like a privilege: like health, like mental wellness.
Over the winter, in the midst of navigating a panic disorder and chronic migraines and undiagnosed neurodivergence, I learned about the concept of crip time. In her book Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer defines it:
“Crip time emerges here as a wry reference to the disability-related events that always seem to start late or to the disabled people who never seem to arrive anywhere on time. As one slang dictionary puts it, ‘crip time’ means both ‘a flexible standard for punctuality’ and ‘the extra time needed to arrive or accomplish something.’”
But crip time, as theorised by Kafer and other writers, also encompasses the ways in which disabled people experience time and its many temporal categories/expectations when unable to fulfil or participate in normative (read: able-bodied, neurotypical, cis-gendered, heterosexual, capitalistic, white supremacist) narratives of time. As Kafer writes, “These shifts in timing and pacing can of necessity and by design lead to departures from ‘straight’ time, whether straight time means a firm delineation between past/present/future or an expectation of a linear development from dependent childhood to independent reproductive adulthood.”
I wonder for how many of us our repeated departures from straight time have led – inevitably, liberatingly – into the garden. We are all familiar with narratives of the garden as a place of healing. But I do not mean and am not interested in the garden as a thing with curative properties in a traditional (abled) sense. The garden is not a magical site that fixes our crip-ness. I am not cured in the garden! What I am talking about is the garden as a physical place and temporal landscape where disability, neurodivergence, and illness are experienced absent of the things that make them burdensome in the rest of the world: feelings of shame, the exhaustion of masking, the constant anxiety in managing difference. I am talking about the garden as a place where crip time is allowed to exist as a joy, as a mode of being and perceiving that enhances and benefits the garden as a living organism.
We all know garden time, that heightened state where the body suddenly fails to catalogue the passing of standardised minutes and hours. Derek Jarman (chronically ill with HIV/AIDS) wrote on March 7, 1989, “The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered.” But garden time in collaboration with crip time takes the body further, building a plane that redeploys the body-mind from a problem to an asset, a collaborator, a caretaker, an equal partner. In the garden (as in chronic illness, as in neurodivergence, as in disability), there is an insistent present-tenseness in which the landscape is changed through the act of paying attention to it. (“Around you the landscape lies trans figured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.”) In an essay published in 1930, On Being Ill, chronically ill writer Virginia Woolf wrote about the temporal shift in becoming a “deserter” of “the army of the upright”. She described how, in lying down and following the stillness that is demanded/afforded by illness, one is able to see the sky and all its monumental, beautiful, terrifying sublimeness (“This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!”) and then find comfort again in the garden, in “these, the stillest, the most self-sufficient of all things that human beings have made companions”. She writes, “It is in their indifference that they are comforting.” I didn’t know what she meant until I did, until whatever it is I am was so full of friction in other parts of the world that the serene unconcern of plant life came as a profound relief. And then, everything I am (sensitive to sensory input, often rendered very still through pain or panic, sometimes slow to process information, reliant on routine) became beneficial to the garden through the steadiness of my observation, the precision of my care, the tenderness of my attendance.
As I make this new garden and feel stocked up, feel correct in myself, feel the joy of knowing my body in the matrix of an emergent ecosystem, some things seem more incandescent than before. Ross Gay’s assertion that to be without a garden is violence, is abnormal, is an imposition of precarity that is not natural resonates from an angrier part of my chest as I experience a less tortured baseline of illness/neurodivergence than before I had a safe garden. “What would happen if we acknowledged that none of this is privilege,” he says, “but rather it is as it should and could be?” The garden does not cure me of what I am; temporarily, it cures me of what the world turns me into as I try to navigate its hostility. It reassures me, when I am not able to be in the world as I want to be, that my life remains useful, embedded, productive, vital. It gives me hot pink rhubarb; it hides me in a gentler time.