How does your garden grow

Watching for seeing

Clarity. Little else matters. To scrape away the industrial grime on the glass—that’s the point of writing for me. A clear view.

I wrote in my last post of my intentions to spring clean my inner life by removal of certain exteriors: my phone, my laptop, and my sedentary indoor life. To this, in the last two weeks of Orthodox Lent, I added: my watching.

Phone, laptop, and indoor life, though diminished, still play, with varying degrees of importance, their parts in my day-to-day. But TV shows, videos, films, movie trailers, clips. I wanted to see what my world would be like without them, and if it would make a difference to my writing.

When I first decided to try this, I told myself that I’d just do it until our Easter, and then I’d see where I was. Giving myself a date to reassess helped to stave off any panic. Well, Christ is Risen, and I still haven’t gone back to the screen.

I’m writing this post so I can understand why.

I began in those two weeks to work on the second draft of my novel, and the characters opened up to me in ways they never had before. My thoughts stilled. I started to notice the natural world. Birds carrying straw for their nests. Frogs and their tadpoles. Wood sorrel closing her petals before a thunderstorm. As a child, I loved eating those flowers, but I never knew them.

Antique botanical print of yellow wood sorrel

In two weeks, there were many such moments, grafting themselves onto me. I’m not the same person I was when I started, which is a strange and almost ridiculous thing to say after so short a time. But I think I’m becoming more myself. I wasn’t myself before, and I’m not entirely there now, but I’ve had glimpses. Clean corners twinkling through. And it’s all come out in my seeing, my joy, my tears (which have been freer), and my writing. That’s worth a great deal. Certainly more than the upcoming season of any show running today and more even than those fond old films I’ve loved all my life.

So I’m going to stick with it. As long as I can. There will still be movies and shows with friends and family—time with them in any capacity is valuable—but not a mindless sink into numbing fantasy.

I’m sure this all sounds melodramatic, and I’m frustrated with my inability to say how much this discovery means to me. But I’d never realized until I let all the watching go just how much of me was being kept dormant.

I left social media years ago and in recent months had taken my YouTube usage down to almost nothing. Still, I had little energy for writing, and reading exhausted me. Now, there’s all this rich silence and energy bubbling under the surface. Books are being read. Words are being written. Notice is being taken.

I feel like Mary Lennox, finding her way into the secret garden. It looks dead, buried and untended, but the ground and green are very much alive. They just needed a little clearing away.

The Secret Garden illustration by Charles Robinson