Keeping Your Pants On When There's So Much To Be Done

Or, why buying seeds is a great example of the action in non-action

Let it be said: there is no greater sucker for seeds than me. I am batty, I am seduced. When I flip through these pages of photos and drawing and descriptions, whether analog or digital, and perhaps especially now that we’re in the dormant time here in the more northern climes, I start dreaming. ~ Ross Gay Inciting Joy

A Sunday morning in late February is a good & tough time to sit on the rug by the window reading things that make me think about gardens and yards and plants. In Michigan, for my whole life, I’ve been aware of the glorious crack in winter that comes for about a week in the middle of this dark little month, where 50-60 degree temperatures come back and everything gets muddy and full of birdsongs. When I was a kid, all my friends would come to school in shorts for a day or two (no way in hell my mom was letting me act like such a fool) and everything would just get sorta spastic.

The same things translate directly into adulthood. People drive noticeably crazier (which is saying something because my people around here do that regularly with a sort of light-running pride that has led to my family referring to any slight speeding up to avoid a red light as Ypsi’ing it). The streets are rowdier downtown. Everyone at the warming center last week was dancing. A few people were wearing sunglasses indoors. The guy who delivers a bunch of donated food from Mama Pizza every week looked like a bit of a panther on a lusty prowl. It’s exciting physically. I can feel my shoulder blades and upper back and hips loosening like I’m a sprout working my way up to break through the soil.

But, the thing is, that’s death as much as it is life.

Because there’s snow on the ground this morning again and there’s a half foot coming this week. Our last frost date in this part of Michigan doesn’t come till the early days of May. It’s a time for waking up a little, but keep your damn pants on for while longer if you know what’s good for you.

My wife Nicole reads me clips of daily Chinese astrology from the Tung Shing most days and this time a year the story is always the same: “it is inauspicious to be too active yet.” Don’t overextend yourself in these early flickerings of almost-spring or you’ll be tapped out and creaky when the real show starts up.

I was thinking about that kind of wisdom this morning, reading Ross Gay talking about something I totally identify with: excitement about the getting ready to grow things time of late winter. I sometimes teach medicinal plant workshops and we cultivate a lot of things that other people are pouring poisons all over in a futile effort to keep them out. I put my bare feet on the ground as much as possible. Thinking about getting nearer to that kind of living again makes me want to move!

But I don’t wanna be one of those people I run into this time a year who are buy a shit-ton of new trays and soil and special gear to get their seeds started in a week or so. First of all, where did the trays from last year go? And I’m damn sure that any seeds started in the first half of March are gonna be root-bound in those little cups or turned to stalky toppling messes by the time you can get them in the ground. It’s too early. People make it work and you can build a greenhouse or you can do a couple rounds of transplanting and yes, yes, yes, yes. But it seems like the whole thing is a preemptory spasm more than good practice. It’s still winter for a bit and we’re living in the north. Keep your pants on a little longer.

That’s what I love about Ross Gay’s bit I started with this morning: he’s going on about that over-exuberant moment when you buy enough seeds to thick-sow a few acres even though you’re living on a city lot that maybe leaves you with 1/20^th of an acre of space to grow things on, then rolls right into talking about how that kind of excess just leads to sharing loads of seeds and starts (nothing wrong with starts, just wait a sec to get them going) with everyone he knows. Perfect. The seasonal drive to get some spring moving in your hips and hands and human connections doesn’t have to lead to you running around like the fool who doesn’t know another blizzard’s blowing this way. And if you’re really smart about it, you can build a bit of community – shore up some connections with the folks around you – from the comfort of the Sunday morning couch. And the gardens’ll feed us all when the time is right. It’s a metaphor and a truth, just like most good metaphors tend to be.

It’s just another way for me to come back to that “doing not-doing” thing from the Tao Te Ching I think about a lot. To exist in the world effectively, it just works a lot better if we are actively focused on not doing a bunch of shit that doesn’t need to be done. I reference Ursula LeGuin’s translation of Chapter 2 a lot, but this morning I was looking through Li-Young Lee and Yun Wang’s version and it resonates with what I have clunking around in my head:

Free of extraneous actions,
the sage lives naturally,

teaching without a word, letting ten thousand things manifest
without interference, and creating without attachment.

There’s another at the end of Chapter 3 that’s more of the same:

Do nothing extraneous,
and peace shall rule.

Of course, what I struggle with in both of these – and with the recommendations to hold up for a second in the Tung Shing dailies Nicole reads to me while I coffee-up in the morning – is that ICE bought a detention center in Southeast Michigan and the University of Michigan is forcing a nuclear weapons computing facility into the neighborhood and there are now over 500 documented homeless people in my fairly small town and probably at least half again as many who are off the books and . . . you know all the rest and more, I’m sure. How does doing not-doing at this moment seem remotely like an option?!?

I’m not about to make a turn toward answering that question. Sorry. But I’m thinking a lot lately about how that either-or thing is a trap in itself and maybe that’s at least a little helpful.

And it turns out that the collective thought-machine is churning on the same kinds of questions because Debbie Liu’s really excellent Bamboo and Jade Substack is diving into a series on the history of the big idea of doing not-doing: wu wei (無為), literally non-action. But Liu points out in the first installment that “although the emphasis in English and other western languages is on the wu 無 - the ‘non’ part of non-action, throughout Chinese history, there has been a continuum of emphasis on the wei 為 in wu wei 無為 — the action in non-action.”

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series and maybe I’m jumping the gun, but it seems like this idea of a back and forth between an emphasis on the “non” and an emphasis on the “action in non-action” is an example of pretty much everything we should expect to find when we dip into a bit of slow inspection of something complex. There isn’t a static answer because things are in constant flux. That’s pretty much the only thing I am sure of as both a Taoist and Marxist dialectical-materialist!

Liu goes on to explain that the early history of wu wei is rooted in the development of a complex balance of personal virtue and actions in accordance with natural order:

For Laozi and Zhuangzi, developing virtue (de 德) in order to be in harmony with dao 道 or nature and the cosmos (heaven, or tian 天) produces a state in which a person acts according to wuwei 無為.

Again, the emphasis isn’t on NOT doing, just on not doing things in ways that are out of balance or in violation of natural cycles.

So I’m pretty sure that Ross Gay’s exuberant ordering of loads of seeds to plant and give away to neighbors is probably the perfect kind of action in the moment before everything is ready to thaw. I’m less sure about my own actions, but maybe that’s a kind of cautiousness that at least keeps me from walking with my knees in the icy breeze? I’m still probably going to head downtown in a bit to stretch my legs and talk with some people about organizing against the data centers pushing into the area. I’m still working on getting folks in my union to take a more active stance in support of the graduate student workers who are getting shafted by the capitalist bosses they’re negotiating with. I’m still going to spend some time this week planning to get some research funding for a really outstanding student I’ve been working with.

But I’m gonna try to do it like I’m ordering seeds, y’know?

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In a sort of related note, check out my new poem “Ode to Leg Hair” in Cider Press Review, a celebration of the change of seasons I’m reminded of by the legs mine lay against every night.