“The growing season has passed. My garden is softening, folding in on itself, beginning the winter melt back into the earth. Still, the birds sing, more visible now as they dart between bare limbs and seedheads. I have lived alongside this growing ecosystem for several seasons, but the changes still feel like revelations.
In her book, The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes, “So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time... The garden was always engaged in a dance with death.” The cycle is relentless, and as you become accustomed to the brevity of forms, even living amongst Summer blooms can feel like hosting a ghost.
Continually moving through these phases of loss has come to feel like a practice. I’m learning to befriend the ghost. And it’s the ghost alongside me that nudges me when an election is lost, or I feel us turning toward tyranny, as I witness people around me becoming fueled with fear. I imagine th
