Guest post: Stray Attention

A reality of their own

Hello,

Outside the window where I write there is a small ledge with an equally small planter. At this latitude (61) you can grow a few vegetables, but our home is shaded by birch and cottonwood, and while I wouldn’t have it otherwise, it never gets much sunlight. So we’ve let the yard be ruled by fireweed, our dogs, and the few squirrels that manage to evade their efforts at hunting. But in the small planter outside, I did bury five small nasturtium seeds, once there were no further hints of frost.

In truth, I am a bit gobsmacked by the kind of magic that happens in planting a seed in barely an inch of soil. That something the size of a pebble or even a grain of sand, kept in an envelope all year, can sprout, produce a root, followed by the green glow of a stem in a matter of days. A week or so later and there is a sweep of sky-facing leaves reflecting back to the birches, as if their new, small bodies long to stretch and unite with the trees, whose branches bend low with nearly two months of sunlight, sap, and leaf. When the fire of the nasturtium’s petals emerge it will truly seem even more miraculous. Bright velvet flames from the dun of soil and seed cote. 

It has me thinking about all that remains hidden, invisible, and yet is nonetheless so much a part of the world, so present with such instinctive force, energy. 

I was thinking of this as I’ve been reading Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own. Milner wrote her memoir in 1926, determined to figure out who she is, what she wanted outside of what society has schooled her to do. She wanted to find her own instinctive life force, hidden beneath the soil. It’s an honest, beautiful look at one woman’s attempt, between the aftermath of one world war and the looming threat of another, to find who she was, what she really wanted “outside the life of opinion,” as she wrote. A radical seeking out the source of what lies hidden.

Milner wrote: “Possibly the thing that matters, that you are looking for, is like the roots of plants, hidden and happening in the gaps of your knowledge.”