The Role of Nourishment in Growth
When I started raising houseplants I had little success. I couldn't figure out the watering schedules, drowning some plants and dessicating others. My first few years of houseplant care led to a graveyard of stem skeletons and hopeless nearly dead plants hanging on by a thread.
I finally adopted a routine watering schedule (every Sunday evening except succulents which I watered on the new moon). The plants stopped dying, but they also never thrived.
It took me years to develop a routine of feeding my plants so they would thrive. I have fed them many things over the years: compost, coffee grounds, the water leftover from boiling eggs, old tea leaves, my menstrual blood (by far the most successful food btw), and these days commercial plant food made by Elm Dirt.
Once I started to regularly feed my plants, they grew into enormous conservatory-level blooming giants. They become robust, resistant to disease and pests (those darn mealy bugs!), and started to prolifically make babies of their own that I have shared far and wide.
The plants are my greatest teachers, and always have been. I have struggled to feed myself over the years as well, often denying my own hunger and need for nourishment. I have survived for years on cigarettes and black coffee as a young nurse, and then drive-thru burgers and fake fruit punches as a young mother. Once I discovered I had several food intolerances, my diet became healthier but extremely limited for a number of years until we discovered nutrient dense and healthy foods that I could safely tolerate with my super-sensitive digestive system.
It wasn't until I started to focus on and understand other kinds of hunger and need for nourishment that I really started to thrive. Hunger for information and connection. for leisure time and solitude, for daydreaming and unfiltered self expression. Feeding myself to satiate these secondary hungers has started my journey to a conservatatory-level blooming giant!
How are you feeding yourself in this season of your life? How are you feeding your body? Your dreams? Your soul? Do you know the language of your hunger? We have been conditioned to demonize and villify our deepest hungers, but I have found that they are locked doors that once opened, lead to our most fully liberated, aligned and radiant expressions of our unique contributions to this world. And when we are fed, we are fun! Playful! Things roll of our backs and we can navigate around obstacles that seem insurmountable when we are depleted, starved, deficient.
Of course, our culture is designed to keep us hungry and dependent on systems of control and oppression to feed us, which makes this very, very tricky. I can feel the deep rage within me when I think about how many people are kept hungry on purpose by people who live off their labor, efforts, creativity, harnessing their gifts while oppressing them in return. We must learn to starve these systems, while nourishing our own deep sovereignty, creativity and purpose. I don't think anyone has the answers to how we do that, just yet, but as each of us looks in a clear-eyed way at our own life, our own community, the systems that we interface with, and starts to make shifts toward change, the way will emerge from our collective effort. The time of a hierarchical savior who will pave the way for us is over. We will pave the way. One nourishing, live-giving, thrive-inducing decision and action at a time.
