Shitty Gardens & Thought Experiments on Love

Let’s just pretend nothing is linear. Let’s pretend our entire lives are happening in one single moment. This one. And, by very nature of this logic, also this one and this one and this moment too. Please remember this every time you receive word from me in your inbox. Happy Wednesday :)

As always, the one-and-only CONTENT section lives at the bottom of this post, so feel free to skip everything between this sentence and that section if you’re not in the mood for my rambling. I understand.

Housekeeping:

• Minneapolis’s interior architecture in downtown buildings is insane (in a lovely, inspiring, refreshing way). Below are low-quality photos I snapped on my iPhone of a few of them. Not pictured is the best one: a place called Emerald City. The locals don’t seem to know how fortunate they are with their heads down-turned toward their phones, speed-walking to their destination several sky-walks and beautiful interior spaces away. I’d like to think that if I were a local I’d walk a little slower and frequently look around at what really is a feat in humanity’s history: functional, beautiful, enduring architecture.

• I copy-and-pasted this newsletter into the Hemingway Editor app online and apparently my writing is ripe for newsletters, because it’s written at an 8th-grade reading level. This was totally intentional of course. You’re welcome.

• I was on the phone with my oldest brother (a truly interesting guy) last night, and oh boy, the man has finally turned against Trump. The tides are shifting, folks!! But I guess this is what happens when tariffs are high and your employer is based in Brazil, Mexico, and you guessed it: Canada. Many of his colleagues, including his best friend, have been laid off, and so as often happens, my brother absorbed all of their positions into his. It’s a shame that it takes personal hardships to chip away at human ignorance, but if that’s what it takes, then at least we can say that change within individuals and communities is imminent, because the hardships are only going to become more pervasive and severe.

• My next newsletter will be significantly shorter, I swear.

Dream Story Time:

A couple of months ago I had a dream that I was in a garden (it was implied in the dream that the garden was my garden), and I was attempting to plant a variety of seeds that might, with a little effort and luck, someday blossom into beautiful, fragrant flowers, along with edible green and orange and purple-streaked things. I assume my dreamscape fashioned itself as it did because at that time I was just a handful of weeks away from moving into a house with a backyard, and I was very stoked about this. The dream was one of those incredibly realistic dreams, which was problematic because of the plot I was thrown into while in the midst of deep REM: the soil in my very own, long-dreamt-of backyard scarcely covered a concerning—and ever-increasing number of—dead bodies. 

Dream Hayley was horrified by this. Waking Life Hayley was also horrified by this.

The Dream Situation didn’t imply that I killed these people, but I got the sense that I was responsible for the presence of these abandoned earthly shells, and not merely because they were in my garden—which I’ll remind you was supposed to be my refuge in nature, my space for cultivating a new beginning!, and for inviting nearby pollinators roaming the neighborhood to come hang—but rather because these corpses’ arrival were clear manifestations of my Very Real wrongdoings (of which I have many). I of course didn’t realize this on an intellectual level until after I woke, but I certainly felt this in the dream, and feeling something is always a thousand times worse (or better, depending on the situation) than processing said experience via the safety net of the prefrontal cortex. Anyway, I felt BAD, like someone who wanted to plant tomatoes and marigolds on a Saturday afternoon but was instead met with dead bodies that she felt responsible for and ill-equipped to dispose of quietly (or without causing a putrid scent to emanate from a Totally Casual Summer Bonfire into my neighbors’ homes).

It quickly became evident that the bodies didn’t rest deeply enough in my little plot of earth to act as compost for my garden-in-the-works, which was my initial hope. Out of desperation, I piled heaps of soil with my bare hands onto the first body in an effort to conceal its presence and then I returned to my newly-planted crops, only for the outline of a new body to appear just inches below a section of topsoil a few feet away. Right from genesis, these bodies’ forms would increase in dimension and mass with each passing second, eking ever closer to a future where their skin could meet air.

So I’d tend to a new dead body as I’d done with previous ones, ensuring that I tended to it quickly enough to avoid seeing what remained of its face, and then, after feeling a moment of reprieve from the nightmare in my garden, I’d spot a pair of legs in my periphery: another corpse entering the scene. And then it got worse. Corpses that I’d already buried started to reemerge.

This is not good, Dream Hayley thought. This will not do.

I woke up and immediately knew my brain had concocted a convincing yet painfully obvious metaphor. So much for new beginnings, I thought. So much for beauty. And so much for finally figuring out how to compost.

Anyway, it’s been a bad summer for gardening. My new garden is mosquito-ridden and rife with fungal disease. Even better, there’s no hose hookup on the side of my house. Classic. Hilarious. Couldn’t have dreamed of a better situation. Yeehaw. My neighbors are very nice, though. They’ve watered my garden and porch plants on many occasions. Good people are everywhere. Don’t forget.

Let’s not forget that the fate of Palestinians is a litmus test for the world we, too, will soon inhabit.

At times I feel useless and powerless, but I know this is how many of us feel. I hear people say that this is how they—the powers that be: the idiots with egos large enough to power a small city and the smart guys who cosplay as cartoon villains for a living—want us to feel. Powerless. Incapable of affecting change. Compliant.

The world that bad&powerful people design may conflict with the world that the majority of humanity wants, and yet those very groups of like-minded assholes need our help to achieve their weird dystopia (at least for now), and we help them accomplish this project through our inaction and acquiescence.

And SOME OF US contribute directly to their causes sans-argument, signed NDA in hand. Don’t be that person.

After all, someone has to drive the trucks and press the buttons and sign the checks and fill the tanks and board the planes that carry the bombs, and it takes an awful lot of people to do that. It often takes a lot of head-down, I-wish-things-were-different-but-if-I-didn’t-do-it-someone-else-would types to accomplish mass destruction. People are weird like that. We can rationalize almost anything, and we do.

Thought experiments:

Does your very kind, loving parent transport military weapons as a truck driver? No? Well what if they did? What would you say to them?

Does your father adhere to fascist beliefs but believe that the word “fascist” is lazily tossed around by Marxists who hate everyone who isn’t a communist? Yes? Well what do we do about that, folks?

Some people aren’t meant to change, which of course isn’t the same as being incapable of change. We can try and try and try to reach those people and still it seems we are destined to come up against a wall, perhaps even a thousand walls. What are these walls made of? I don’t know. One’s obstinance? Ignorance? Their steadfast adherence to the ideology that’s kept them alive this long? The PFAs accumulating in their blood-brain barrier? 

If these people aren’t supposed to change—what then? Do we choose to love them anyway? Perhaps we’ve chosen to run head-first into their timeless walls of division and fear, again and again, precisely because of our love for them. Why else would we spend our time so stupidly? Out of love and hope of course. The problem is that this incessant confrontation—these attempts to reach people we love and help them look upon the world from a different vantage point—affects very little in the way of change. You know this. I know this. But unfortunately only the wise act upon such obvious truths, while others—myself included—are doomed to act on emotion six times per day.

But I’m learning, and perhaps we don’t need to infiltrate and demolish or renovate the walls of a person’s mind in order to love them. Perhaps we can simply love them, without conditions, and use our newfound time not to fight their ideas but to illuminate better ones. Whether they choose to come along with us or stay behind—cocooned in front of a TV tuned 24/7 to Fox News, exhausted, angry, and suspicious of change and humanity alike—is up to them.

We really have to escape the noise (but when I say “I” I mean “We” and vice versa):

And similarly to the whole Loving Difficult People thing, perhaps instead of engaging with harmful, oppressive systems by consuming hours of strategically-curated noise, we use that time to create and strengthen social systems that serve us; to establish and deepen our communal ties; and devise proactive, effective strategies that help us tackle issues that will inevitably arise, if they haven’t already. Think creating more worker-owned stores; using “dumb phones” that help curb the noise; and spearheading robust local food production systems through community gardens and urban farming. For many of us, this also includes ditching the abominable water-guzzling lawns that decimate soil biodiversity and use up prime real estate that could be used for, I don’t know, growing something useful, say food and herbs. Don’t be weird: Stop watering your suburban yard’s invasive Kentucky Bluegrass sod so that Jim Smith next door thinks well of you. Wasting a finite resource like water on your chemical-treated grass is not cool or impressive—it’s just as weird as 14^th century Poles wearing jingly poulaines to communicate that manual labor was beneath them. What’s cool is teaching your kids how to grow an heirloom like they’ve never tasted in their fleeting little lives.

These are things people are already doing, but what might happen if each of us—all of us—used our time not just to be aware of “the news,” but to work toward something that interrupts the chaos-echo-machine for much longer than a single 24-hour news cycle. (Another thought experiment).

One more thought experiment on the topic and then I’m done: Is it obvious why difficult people are in our lives or manipulating them from the periphery—aside from the fact that we were born to them or birthed them or currently receive paychecks from them—that they’re here to teach us how to love more readily and deeply? Is it for us to discover unconditional love for others? To develop or expand our empathy? Did we ask these loved ones a long time ago (I’m thinking pre-birth here) to be in our lives and be Some Type Of Way so that they could help us grow and forgive and expand, and vice versa?

Did we spit into our 4D hands, say “Okay, but you asked for this, so don't be upset with me for being Woefully Neurotic and Challenging when this is all said and done,” and then smash our nasty little non-molecular palms together and jump into womb-destined shoots?

I’ve been choosing to think so.

Because I can.

Content time:

• This short playlist about heartbreak as an identity

  • The new BRONCHO album also kind of rules. But just a little.

• Movie: Last Summer 

  • Jon Waters said it was “shocking”—a truly bold statement coming from the man who wrote Pink Flamingos, which is OBJECTIVELY, vastly more shocking and weird). But Last Summer was excellent. It was provocative, insane, and yet the scandalous (yes, that is the correct word for this film) plot was completely believable. I empathized with people I probably shouldn’t have empathized with. I wanted to jump out of my seat when people did bad things in a shed during a birthday party for a pair of precious toddlers. I literally said, “Oh my god, No,” aloud at least twice. The ending! The irony and the hypocrisy! The ending! But really, it was quite good. Something about power. Something about the monotony of the Good Life. And definitely something about lust, or love, or limerence’s distant cousin.

    At the end of the day we’re all just flawed people, and Last Summer asks us to consider where we personally draw the lines that bifurcate our adherence to, and divergence from, society’s (un)written rules. I think we’re all more susceptible to doing bad things than we’re willing to admit.

  • Alternative movie: Midnight (1939) starring Claudette Colbert and Drew Barrymore’s great-grandfather. Truly: 10/10. That film brought me so much joy.

  • Quotes:

    • “I love my family, but it’s a funeral here.” —My Aunt Christina introducing herself to my mother for the first time.

    • “As a Tibetan saying goes: ‘Tomorrow or the next life—which comes first, we never know.’” —Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

    • “I’m so tired. I can’t keep doing this. I’ve taken years off of my life.”

      —The author of this newsletter reflecting on her sleep habits.

  And finally, my psychic mother’s most recent prediction (via SMS): “Sept 4 or close hurricane in Fl” (she means Florida if it isn’t clear)

What have you been listening to and/or watching and/or reading and/or doing? Really, I want to know.

Best wishes,

-Hayley