“Can you give me a recipe for nature?” you asked. And I started to write. I stopped. Deleted everything. Started again. Deleted again. And again. Until I started to wonder how to write a un- recipe, a recipe for un-doing. How to unbake a cake? How to unroast a chicken? How to unstretch pasta, unstir the pot of ragout, unspin the pizza?
The recipe for nature’s recovery is laced with the two secret methods of “not doing” and “undoing”.
I am not privy to these secrets, other than the fragments I have overheard of them in the early mornings when the rain taps at the window and in the whispers from the beach-walk winds. I have garnered slithers of knowledge from the woods where wild flowers sing their silence, and I have caught a note or two.
I experiment in my garden and time and again, my patient mother Earth tells me ‘"No, not like that."
I sitll have much to learn in these arts, but here are things that might just work a little magic. I make no promises
- Take a patch of ground…and do nothing with it. Do not dig, do not clear of anything that is not an immediate danger. Give it four seasons and then four more. Just watch what grows.
- Pick sparingly, but do pick – be a grazing animal in your garden. Pick for food, pick for beauty.
- Cut likewise with judicious limits, and preferably after seeding.
- Find the book of ancient lore and study it. Dedicate an hour a day to learning the forgotten things.
- Attune yourself to the day: rise with the sun and prepare to rest when it sets. Note how daylight lingers on. Quieten your evenings slowly into night.
- Attune yourself to the cycles of the moon, the ebb and flow of short-term cycles.
- Attune yourself to the cycles of the earth’s journey around the sun, the rise and fall of longer cycles.
- Accept the weather: wonder what is to be learned from havoc wrought.
- When the storm comes, expose yourself to it. Briefly and safely, just one step beyond your comfort zone. Understand that we are not controlling anything.
- Take another patch of ground and grow things: flowers or food, beautiful or useful or both.
- Welcome what comes to live in your space.
- Remember your space is all of space, tend it all as you tend your own garden.
- Simplify everything. Slowly. Trying to do anything too quickly will only compound uncertainty, and we naturally seek to banish uncertainty by complexity.
- Be content. All of nature’s hurt and harm has arisen through our discontent, our cravings for more or different or, allegedly, better.
- Never upgrade until you need to replace – even then ask yourself if you really need more bells and whistles, perhaps this is an opportunity to have fewer of them.
- Dedicate an hour of your week to not doing, just being. Meditate on how few resources you are using in that moment and be prepared to be shocked at how many.
- Dedicate an hour of your month to undoing – to cleaning or clearing or fixing or helping to mend – a beach, a river, a friendship, a soul. One mindful hour of helping.
I would love to tell you that I do all of these things all of the time, but of course it would be untrue. I do most of them, some of the time, and I aim to grow further into them.
A few years ago, when my life was in transition, I had my motivations “mapped”. No-one who knew me was surprised to learn that my primary motivator was Achievement. It had been bred into me since childhood. You can only do your best, was the double-edged family motto. I was rewarded for ‘success’. Naturally, I bought into the societal definition of success. I don’t remember spending much time contemplating what my own definition might be.
There were hints though, if I’d actually bothered to listen more closely to some of the things I said. Time always mattered more than money. My happiest hours were when I was out walking. Or at the beach. I talked about sacred spaces, even while professing not to believe in deities and after-lives. Despite a potato crisps and wine habit, I would equally happily snack on raw broccoli, cauliflower or sugar-snap peas.
As I start to more fully settle into this new chapter, I’m beginning to realise that I may have been bred to ‘achievement’, but I was born to ‘simplicity’. I still study, but more gently and with no exams to be passed. Learning now for its own sake, and for my own growth. One of the things I am learning, at times because I’m forced to do so, is slowness.
The ultimate in slowness is “not doing”. “Not doing” is clearly not always the answer, there are times when we need to take action. There are times when action has to be rapid, instinctive, or on the basis of ingrained training. Life is complex and messy, and there are no certain rules for anything. Even so, I feel that the rush-to-action which has become our default setting, may not be
the most helpful one. Sometimes the answer to the question “What can I do?” really is “Nothing”.
~ / ~
