On Palms and Letting Go
My twoish-year-old palm plant has been struggling the past several months. I took it home from my office just about this time last year, when I knew I’d be quarantined and working from home for the foreseeable future. My curious, plant-loving cats chewed it (they’re such cute little forces of destruction sometimes), and it began to look ragged, brown, and dry. Even after taking it back to my office and away from said cats last summer and doing my best to nurture it back to health, it’s still pretty brown, dry and ragged. After some troubleshooting (and a consult with my amazing gardener and landscaper dad), It seems that I’ve been, well, over-nurturing it. All the overwatering has made its roots rot (and smell foul, I might add), and it’s now in need of a whole new pot because it just can’t get away from the over-saturation. It’s been tinkered with so much, first by the teeth of cats and then by my own overzealous attempts to fix it, that it’s had no space to sit in the sun, dry out, and attempt to do what it knows to do intuitively.
This reflection is not really about a palm, but about giving myself (and perhaps you, if you’re still magically here after that rambling story about a plant) permission to trust, let go, and—perhaps most importantly—let things be.
I love to tinker and fix and get things just so. And while my tinkering and nurturing often does good, this tendency is also connected to deeply ingrained behaviors that I’ve absorbed from all sorts of places and cultural conditions—white supremacy being one of them. I’m on a lifelong journey of reckoning with the ways in which whiteness and histories and legacies of colonization has sometimes problematically taught me to view complex, people-centered issues as problems to solve with logic and linear checklists. Whiteness (and cis-, straight-, able-bodied-, patriarchal, and other privileges) want to center me and my privilege as the fixer at the center, rather than acknowledging harm and working towards repair and right relationship with communities of color and indigenous communities whose varied communal identities, cultural and political leadership long preceded and engaged in the world and its complexity prior to my ancestor colonizers.
I too often so deeply believe a story that tells me that I’m not enough unless I’m doing things perfectly or that I am what I achieve. It not only has the potential to cause harm for communities and people around me, but it also leaves me feeling so deeply… untethered. Untethered from the foundational truth that I am and we are, each of us, beloved. Period.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The near-constant internal and external pressures of metrics: Likes and comments, and companies that profit from our fixation on likes and comments. The next curated content and programs. The checklists. The goals. The measured outcomes. Even more insidiously: the pressures of metrics even when enduring and trying to survive and care for one another in a pandemic. We can’t let go of it, can we? The profit-seeking story that tells us in hundreds of different ways that we aren’t truly worthy, loved, and capable of flourishing if we don’t produce—or make productions of one another—with maximum efficiency and resulting external approval.
As I dwell in this Christian season of Lent, my palm reminds me that all of my (even well-intentioned, sometimes important) tinkering can actually spoil the soil I seek to nurture and learn from. And sometimes I’m the palm that’s oversaturated and dried up and in need of nothing but rest and space to be.
My plant reminds me that palms that become ashes hold lessons about relinquishing control and fasting from impulses that want to fix and tinker. It reminds me that rest and deep listening are the deep, sustaining roots of altruism and justice. When my goals and attentiveness are rooted in those places, and not in economic stories about squeezing outcomes at whatever emotional or spiritual cost, I am living in truer alignment with a calling that is larger than me.
Yes, there is much to tend and care for and water. But the story that grounds the tending and caring matters.
In the same spirit as the serenity prayer, here’s to discerning with grace and wholeheartedness when it’s time to: change the things we can; let go of what isn’t ours to fix; sever the unnecessary tie between our goodness or worthiness and our achievements; and, perhaps most of all, to lean into the wisdom to know the differences between them all.
This reflection is not really about a palm, but about giving myself (and perhaps you, if you’re still magically here after that rambling story about a plant) permission to trust, let go, and—perhaps most importantly—let things be.
I love to tinker and fix and get things just so. And while my tinkering and nurturing often does good, this tendency is also connected to deeply ingrained behaviors that I’ve absorbed from all sorts of places and cultural conditions—white supremacy being one of them. I’m on a lifelong journey of reckoning with the ways in which whiteness and histories and legacies of colonization has sometimes problematically taught me to view complex, people-centered issues as problems to solve with logic and linear checklists. Whiteness (and cis-, straight-, able-bodied-, patriarchal, and other privileges) want to center me and my privilege as the fixer at the center, rather than acknowledging harm and working towards repair and right relationship with communities of color and indigenous communities whose varied communal identities, cultural and political leadership long preceded and engaged in the world and its complexity prior to my ancestor colonizers.
I too often so deeply believe a story that tells me that I’m not enough unless I’m doing things perfectly or that I am what I achieve. It not only has the potential to cause harm for communities and people around me, but it also leaves me feeling so deeply… untethered. Untethered from the foundational truth that I am and we are, each of us, beloved. Period.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The near-constant internal and external pressures of metrics: Likes and comments, and companies that profit from our fixation on likes and comments. The next curated content and programs. The checklists. The goals. The measured outcomes. Even more insidiously: the pressures of metrics even when enduring and trying to survive and care for one another in a pandemic. We can’t let go of it, can we? The profit-seeking story that tells us in hundreds of different ways that we aren’t truly worthy, loved, and capable of flourishing if we don’t produce—or make productions of one another—with maximum efficiency and resulting external approval.
As I dwell in this Christian season of Lent, my palm reminds me that all of my (even well-intentioned, sometimes important) tinkering can actually spoil the soil I seek to nurture and learn from. And sometimes I’m the palm that’s oversaturated and dried up and in need of nothing but rest and space to be.
My plant reminds me that palms that become ashes hold lessons about relinquishing control and fasting from impulses that want to fix and tinker. It reminds me that rest and deep listening are the deep, sustaining roots of altruism and justice. When my goals and attentiveness are rooted in those places, and not in economic stories about squeezing outcomes at whatever emotional or spiritual cost, I am living in truer alignment with a calling that is larger than me.
Yes, there is much to tend and care for and water. But the story that grounds the tending and caring matters.
In the same spirit as the serenity prayer, here’s to discerning with grace and wholeheartedness when it’s time to: change the things we can; let go of what isn’t ours to fix; sever the unnecessary tie between our goodness or worthiness and our achievements; and, perhaps most of all, to lean into the wisdom to know the differences between them all.
Comments
Post a Comment