Notes on Rot

Death anxiety and the fear of not doing enough

Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

Hey there everyone—

A friend dropped off a bag of Italian plums last week. They’re oval and dark purple, with a gray powdery coating. She has five trees in her yard, and the plums were overflowing. She told me they were already getting juicy since being picked. I fit some in the fridge, but the rest had to live in a bag on the front porch. I start slicing some of them up on Friday night, adding chopped apples and cinnamon to my crockpot, the beginnings of apple plum butter. 

Saturday morning, I tell myself I need to make pesto before the temperature falls and the basil leaves lose their pungency. That will go in the freezer. But the freezer is full, so full the vegetables in the fridge are freezing because the temperature is off so I put the wilting vegetables on the counter and turn my attention to the freezer. Several half-loaves of bread end up on the counter, an ice pack that could defrost goes into the basement, the mystery packets wrapped in tinfoil head to the trash. I knock the cinnamon container off the counter with my elbow because I have a bunch of frozen food in my arms and it’s kind of burning my hands so I’m moving too fast. The cinnamon makes pretty patterns when it falls, but now there’s brown dust on top of the mud I’ve tracked in from the backyard, where I’ve been clearing the ground of weeds and a spent sunflower, so tall it’s still making shade from its wide stalk.

I bought a box of tomatoes from the local produce stand last week, too, and put them on my dining table to finish ripening. If I don’t can them this weekend they’ll be too ripe. I’m battling fruit flies the whole time. Putting baskets of tomatoes that are ripe in the microwave to save them; rustling the plum bag on the porch, as if I can scare the flies away by shaking it. I bought some starts, too, at a local nursery: kale, lettuce, arugula. They need to go into the ground fast, because rain is forecast on Sunday and it’s Saturday and they’ll benefit from a good soaking. Also, I’m late. If the temperature drops too fast they won’t develop roots and be sturdy enough to make it through the winter. Sunday morning I go to check them and an intrepid creature has already eaten two of the kale starts, taking them down to the ground. There’s one leaf left, cast aside like a thank you card on the dirt.

When I look out of the bathroom window I see squirrels with huge nuts in their mouths, running full tilt across the grass and then scrambling up the fence. They don’t care how much noise they make; they don’t care that the nuts are so big their balance is off and they keep almost falling off the fence. They have to get the nuts in the ground. The finches are massing on the feeders, too, staying there all day, instead of following their summer pattern of dipping in and back, flying away and returning in the sun.

Last week I listened to an interview between the arts consultant and therapist Beth Pickens, who specializes in working with artists and wrote Make Your Art No Matter What, and Austin Kleon, the author of a number of bestselling books, like Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work. Pickens was telling Kleon about the kinds of anxieties she sees in her artist clients. She said every artist should have a death acceptance practice. This was her first slide:

We will die.

Then she said:

Having a death acceptance practice helps us be in the living while we are alive. You have a lot of work to make while you’re here and I want you to move around the fear that’s stopping you, and a death acceptance practice can help you do that.

Another reason to have the practice is that throughout history it’s artists who have been explaining death and the divine to us. You are our best hope for describing, for approaching, for encountering the ineffable. So the fact that we will die; the fact of our mortality, we rely on you to help us understand and interpret this. 

Our lives are finite, and I want you to make your work. You have to make your work.

I had those words in my head this weekend, while everything I was harvesting was trying its best to rot, because that’s its job—to decompose, either so its seeds can enter the ground and sprout in spring, or so it can fertilize the soil for something else. Those fruit flies were harbingers of death. The kale plants were being taken out with a vengeance because the animals know if they don’t fatten up they’ll die. If I didn’t can or freeze my way through the weekend, the rot would win. 

The rain came on Saturday night. Sunday morning the sky was dark gray, the dogwood leaves dripping. I imagined my own body, dead on the ground, rain softening me up like a zucchini on the vine. There’s nothing special about death, about rotting. It happens to the best of us. That image didn’t stop me from scurrying around, packing it in for winter. I did can the tomatoes, and the apple butter, and I did my best to protect the remaining starts. I didn’t get to the basil yet.

One thing I love about Pickens’ recommending a death practice is that it obliterates the ego, if only for a second. It pushes me past my own preciousness, my avoidance of my disappointment that the work isn’t amazing, glorious, ground breaking. It’s just work. It’s just appreciation for being able to think, in communion with other people, in one split second.

The fact of death makes the risk of making something worth taking. 

But the fact of death can also drive making into a practice of dissociated frenzy. All my activity, keeping the image of my corpse at bay. I’ve been holding the tension between the need to take the risk, make the thing, and the need to be present, not use the work to escape the body, the feelings that are lurking and waiting for me to break my focus.

How much work is enough? Enough in terms of quantity, or quality, or fullness of expression of an idea? When is a piece of work good enough to be called finished and released? When I substitute the word “art” for “work,” the question has more gravity to it. If I say “content,” it has less. Weak art sucks; weak content just gets overridden with more content. There’s this truism that the more content a person creates, the better. Better connection with the audience; better engagement; an increasing reassurance in the relationship between the two sides, creator and receiver, each demonstrating how much the other matters to them.

Beth Pickens doesn’t say make a whole bunch of art, no matter what. She just says make art. It’s me who’s added the question of enough to it, as I watched myself canning jar after jar, filling up every crevice of my freezer and pantry. I live in a city. I can walk to a grocery store. It’s really ok. Except, somewhere in my being, it’s not. How hard do I have to work, in my own eyes, to feel like I get to rest, that I’ve shown the universe my gratitude for being here? 

I’m reading Zen priest and teacher Rev. angel Kyodo williams’ first book Being Black: Zen and the art of living with fearlessness and grace. She tells the story of her first silent meditation retreat. That night, she sat in the dining hall participating in oryoki, the word for formal meal, which also means “just enough.” She explains that Zen meals are served in three bowls, with each bowl containing one dish. The expectation is that the person being served will indicate to the server when to stop filling each bowl. The person being served may have as much food as she likes. The rule is that there are no seconds, and the person eating must finish all the food they requested. Like all aspects of the retreat, the practice is designed to cultivate attention. How much is enough?

Learning about oryoki in advance, Rev. angel was pleased. How lovely to take and eat only what you need. It wouldn’t be difficult to do this, she reasoned. But then the food arrived, smelling delicious. She wasn’t sure how hungry she might be later, and didn’t want to be uncomfortable and restless, needing more food. She took what she thought was a small amount of each dish.

I was only halfway into the greens when I realized I was in trouble. I didn’t know if it was nervous energy from doing my first all-day retreat, but I knew what I had in my bowls to eat was too much. Not wanting to seem as if I had just been greedy, I stuffed it all down. When I looked up, everyone was finished with their meals. They had all been waiting for me.

It was only a little embarrassing and I didn’t think much about it until the next time I did oryoki, this time at a week-long retreat. To my own amazement, every single day, for three meals a day, I would get too much. My bowls were never overflowing or even filled to the brim, so it was hard for me to understand why it kept happening. Before each meal I would say, “Okay, this time I’ll get it right” and almost every time, it seemed like everyone ended up waiting for me. . . . What the practice of oryoki made me realize is that I still carried the childhood sense that I wouldn’t get enough.

How still do we have to be, how in tune with our own emotions, our own histories, our own drivers of our most authentic belief systems and behaviors, before we can land on our own sense of “enoughness”? There’s the way consciousness is always serving up the next goal, the next fantasy of success, luring us away from the sufficiency of the present moment. And then there’s the awful feeling, if we drop down into our innermost knowing, and find that we haven’t given expression to what is most potent to ourselves, because it feels too dangerous.

The art of making can be the gift of presence, or it can be a defense, a wall against death anxiety. We can use work to make sure we aren’t here, emotionally; to stay safe in our heads. We can use words on a page, or brush marks on a canvas, or imprints of a chisel on wood, like breath on a cold window in winter, fogging the glass, to show we’re still here.

I’m still struggling to drop into my knowing of what enough feels like. I’m still acting like my tidy schedule, my cross marks through the items on my to do list, are evidence that I’m worthy. There was one day this summer that I sat in the garden and did nothing but look. I sat there in silence, for over two hours, watching the leaves move, the birds fly. It was more than enough.

Stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca