Cabbages, Albatrosses, and Terrariums

For the past several years, I’ve used the time between Winter Solstice and my mid-January birthday as a period of reflection, assessment, and intention-setting. It’s been a practice I value, a positive inner tipping point, and an anchor to my year… and here it is, past Spring Equinox now, and I still haven’t done it.

Partly the past few years, and this most recent one in particular, have left me too tired and drained and burnt out to think straight, let alone access the connections and creativity the inform such reflection. But that part is obvious, and although it’s deep, it’s also superficial in a way. It’s a current state of response to circumstances. It’s not ME. It’s how I feel, in relation to things that have happened. It’s the brine that flavours and preserves the cabbage, which, despite all the fermenting in the world, and new names for it’s enhanced state, is still cabbage. Sauerkraut, Kim Chee, Kalam Tors, Hapankaall… cabbage.

Below that is my self, watching the pickling process. Yes, it changes the cabbage, but the alternative is to let the cabbage remain the same… which it can’t. Cabbages are extraordinarily hardy, and they can even get tough, but anything living will expire if it doesn’t change, if it doesn’t have what it needs. Vegetables rot, water stagnates, species fail, brains get stuck in ruts, souls atrophy. My recent batch of sauerkraut went bad. Learning and adapting are part of the responsibility and the reward for being alive. Waste that, and you waste the whole point of being alive. The odd human inclination to try to evade the passage of time by focusing on a singular piece of time is like damming a river to savour a drop, and it carries the same consequences.

We can stop the water, we can mummify the cabbages in plastic wrap, we can pretend we didn’t see the tipping points… but nothing halts the flow of life and time while we pretend we’re in control.

So the year is past the quarter point, and I still don’t know how to assess the past one, let alone move on from it.

As I look for a way, I think of my grandfather trying to pick up things which were really just mirages produced by a busy carpet pattern and not being allowed to wear his prescription glasses.

Maybe some of the pieces I’m trying to pick up are not mine. Maybe some of the issues I’m trying to claim are not mine. Maybe I’m not just worn out because of my own life.

It seems like more and more of us are tired.

It stands to reason.

As well as the increasing personal stresses of an anthropocene world and what may quite likely be the last age of our species, we are all being directly affected individually by the same things destroying the global ecosystem.

If you added up all of the agricultural and processing chemicals consumed and absorbed in your daily life via food, clothing, etc… the cleaners, the commercial personal products… the microplastics… the atmospheric carbon and pollutants… the heavy metals… the toxic levels of light and noise… the depletion of nutrition in the global food supply… the culture of stress and materialism and competitiveness over community… the flood of pharmaceuticals, not for healing but for masking individual and systemic symptoms and for silencing and distracting… if you added it all up, regardless of governmentally sanctioned ‘safe’ amounts, because it’s cumulative, and pervasive… if you look at all the effects of all of that – we’re in a serious pickle.

The Earth responds with increasingly volatile and violent geological and meteorological traumas. Her lungs are ruined. Her blood is poisoned. Her bones have been harvested. Her soul has been tied and tortured. We are part of Her, and we cannot not feel that. Even those not consciously connected with the whole greater ecosystem we are part of feel the seizures and breakdowns in their own lives, framed in their own immediate circumstances. Either way, we are not alright, and too many are too tired.

The effects of all those things saturating our bodies and planet are broad and are reflected in globally increasing and increasingly severe physical and mental health issues. It’s also reflected in a general decrease in awareness, critical thinking skills, focus, decision-making ability, motivation, and all those issues issues plaguing many of us these days – and plaguing our species as a whole. It’s quite odd and anthropocentric to delude ourselves with notions of being immune to all that – we’re as much part of the global ecosystem as every single other living and nonliving thing on this planet. Relative the the universe, we’re a small terrarium. If you keep filling the terrarium with toxins and albatrosses and alligators and all the rest of it, it dies. Even the cabbages.

I actually need something like a terrarium, or a big old aquarium… it doesn’t have to hold water, just plants and warm air, because my poor beautiful houseplants are not tolerating this winter and this stress any better than I am… and while fresh air helps me and is sometimes absolutely necessary even with this air purifier thing running, in recent temperatures, it hurts them. I need to nurture them in light of circumstances and in light of not caring for them properly.

I need to create and environment where they can grow.

I need to create an environment where I can grow.

We need to create a world where life can grow.

None of that will happen without change, deep adaptation, and the willingness to let go… let go of old frameworks, old dreams, old conceptions of identity and the reality of our shared situation… let go of needing control and reference points and formatted goals. They’re gone anyways.

Let change happen. Follow it. Something inside is still connected to everything else and it will lead if given rein. Trust it.

I‘m tired, and cabbage needs time to become sauerkraut, and albatrosses are always heavier when you try to throw them off… but I can ferment instead of rot and I can grow.

And people in glass terrariums don’t throw alligators, so know this is just a Tuesday evening train of thought, followed because playing tetris with mixed metaphors clears my head, and posted because… because I like writing and sharing thoughts, and haven’t for a while.

I will again, and I’ll try to make it sooner than later, but time and life are as unpredictable as fermentation and the weather.

Meanwhile, with love and fermenting thoughts,

Ann

PS... I have figured out this new photo editor at all yet, so till I do, please enjoy this sauerkraut borrowed from a recipe online...