No bad seed
I’ve been neglectful.
I’ve always been a very private person and during the pandemic I really settled into my shell and it has taken me quite a while to poke my head back out. There was a lot of introspection and some recalibration here and there. I moved three times during the pandemic and when I settled into living at Ajoupa Gardens in Freeport at the beginning of March in 2021 I spent a lot more time outdoors, exploring their beautiful 4-acre garden than I spent indoors at my computer. I didn’t stop working. I completed projects for Nudge Caribbean and the Trinidad and Tobago Unit Trust Corporation but I also engaged with the garden, getting in the dirt to plant cassava and pigeon peas, sweating and bleeding through a tussle with an overgrown bougainvillea fence. The land was kind like it always is. I replanted the cassava bed and the pigeon peas struggled but the garden gave sapodilla, pineapples, oranges, grapefruits, canistel, Chinese tamarind, fat pork (which is neither fat nor pork), mangoes, various herbs and flowers, shade and medicine, the glorious raucous of birdsong and the peace of stillness.
I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I wrote for myself. I agonised over what would happen next and discovered beauty everywhere. In the garden there was one constant, change. It’s amazing how worked up we get about the future or our own unknowing, slipping into a kind of paralysis, when the only thing we have ever really been able to predict is that change will occur.
Very often things happen outside of our own control. We can plant a seed and nurture it but there is no guarantee it will grow tall and strong and give fruit. It might grow tall and strong and give shade. It may not grow at all. But this doesn’t make it a bad seed. In the nature of things it might just be fulfilling its purpose: shade is needed, the seed that didn’t germinate may have fed the ants or even the earth itself.
Rory and Bunty O’Connor settled into Central Trinidad, in an area where the land was decimated by years of monoculture and created a garden paradise. You can feel the love they put into the garden when you are walking the trails. They put the work in. Everyday they walk the land, stopping to prune or to plant, to weed or to water. During my first year there, I remember during a particularly damp rainy season, the sound of thunder and torrential rainfall kept me under the covers well into the morning. Then I heard the sound of the wheelbarrow trundling through the garden. When I poked my head through the window, I witnessed the pair of them drenched from head to toe, shoes caked in mud, carting cuttings. Their faces were beaming with the light of joy.
Bunty is a persistent and very knowledgable potter. It is another expression of her love for the land. She gets her hands in the clay, in the mud, almost every day. When she puts her creations in the kiln it is a kind of alchemy with sometimes unpredictable results. Even when her designs do not materialise the way she planned she doesn't get too torn up about it. She makes for the joy of making. If something doesn’t get sold or made into a present, she may just put it in the garden where it enjoys a new status as a thing of wonder for the birds and the iguanas and the agoutis. Even if it is smashed to bits it may come to life again in another sculpture, it may return to mud.
I learned so many valuable lessons there, collected so many stories. I grew and grew in that garden too. I am so grateful they created this sanctuary in the centre of the island.
I’ve been practicing patience with myself and with the benefit of the lessons I have learned I have started to move towards developing an improved relationship with myself and with my craft. I know that not every turn of phrase that I dream up will turn into a campaign, a solution or a story. What is important is that a writer is writing today, planting, pruning, watering, cultivating a healthy garden of the mind and trusting that there are no bad seeds.