The rhododendron and I share a vintage

On deadheading. And how it relates to everything, everywhere.

This is like time travel. I wrote this essay sometime earlier this summer and it hasn’t felt baked enough to push it out. Something here isn’t done, the point isn’t fully made, I haven’t yet extracted the fullness of the lesson. But this morning I emerged from weeks of blurry vision (metaphorically obvs) feeling ready to bring it out of my Notes app and into the universe of Substack. (Noting how disembodied this way of writing and publishing is. From one app to another. From a horizontal screen to a vertical screen. Or the other way around.) Anyway, here goes, an assertively „not-fully-baked” essay on gardening and life.

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Things that are pleasant and tedious

Never thought I would be spending large chunks of my Sundays deadheading plants.

Deadheading is a process by which you get rid of the recently bloomed, fizzled, brown flowers. If you have ever been tasked with deadheading a large, old rhododendron, you’ll know it’s a shit ton of work. Immeasurable to what you’d imagine. And both pleasant and tedious at the same time, which is also hard to grasp. 

In the case of rhododendrons, you need to find the precise spot where the flower connects to the rest of the plant with a tiny brownish stump. The tiny stump lives amidst a bunch of tiny green stems, which until recently held the blooming pink petals. Each stem holds one petal. So there’s a lot of tiny green stems, and along with the whittled petals these stems stand between you and the tiny brown stump. The stump is where you need to make your “incision”, before discarding the ex-bloom. If you snip too far beyond the stump, you are damaging next years buds that have already emerged in all of their petit glory. Again - I cannot stress it enough - the precision of this act is surgical. 

Pruning, deferring

Our house was built the year that I was born. The plants were planted around the same time. So the rhododendron and I are the same age. 

Now, the goal of deadheading - as I have educated myself - is to supercharge new growth. The dead flowers and the thin bright stems that hold them take away the essential vibrancy from the rest of the plant. They suck up the water and nutrients that could go to the newly emerged buds of future flowers. 

Here I am twisting off green-looking, healthy-seeming parts, which could easily have kept on greening, in favor of a more beautiful, future rhododendron. In a year’s time. Without necessarily having the certainty that this rigorous process will in fact make the new blossoms more “wow”. Talk about commitment. Talk about fortitude. Talk about belief. Deferred gratification 101. Pruning the parts that bring us rhododendrons down. 

You see where I’m going? Or do I need to spell out the leap? 

What would the future me want me to do today? Where do I muster the faith and the trust that following through today, will be rewarded in the abstraction of „tomorrow”? 

What space could I make if only I sheared the belief / idea / self-image / toxic people / {insert whatever seems appropriate}? What’s wilted and ready to drop to the ground? And also - what have I inherited versus what feels true to me.

And what if the thing you want to “deadhead” is the thing putting up the biggest fight?

I want to do x, so why can’t I?

For many months now (as you could tell by my silence) I have had the hardest time prioritizing the thing that’s important to me. Writing. Not just here publicly but also my own personal writing that happens in the early morning when my brain’s rested but fuzzy and supple and things spill out with ease, or late at night when I write to untangle the knots and smooth out the creases.

What happens is something like this: I will want to write but will have the case of the “overwhelm”. Too many things I want to write all while simultaneously feeling like I have nothing new to contribute. The classy imposter. (Would make a great title for one of those coffee-table-magazines-almost-books btw.)

Or I will physically, objectively, reasonably have no time to write and yet somehow squeeze in a crap Netflix show instead of doing the thing I want to be doing. Numbing out of the fear that comes with any creative pursuit. What if it sucks. What if I suck. 

Or I will finally have a pocket of time and realize I am so exhausted from work, life, caretaking, traveling, gardening, organizing, planning, paying bills that writing is a wild consideration. And yet, and still… the idea to write pops up, nagging at me. And just like that a creative outlet gets reshaped as another chore. Instead of accepting my tired reality, there goes… another „should”, another „have to”.

(Some cool people write about this: Rob Tourtelot here,

Yancey Strickler

here, and

Kelly Wilde Miller

here.)

I know this cycle in me and I know this cycle from every coaching container I’ve ever held. „I want to do X but Y and Z get in my way”. „I need to do this to be the person I believe myself to be - so why can’t I?” „I made a commitment to myself and I have to follow through but it feels like I’m standing in my own way.” 

The solution seems logical and straightforward. „Just do it”. 

Except it is never logical or straightforward. The more„shoulds” and „need tos” and „have tos” we wage at ourselves - the further away we are from actually doing the thing we allegedly want to be doing. And the (possibly only) thing that works, with spinny cycles like this, is what I did last weekend. 

The dance and the tightrope

The heaviness and aching in my should(er) blades (see what I did there?!) - I let it be a signal for a sweet nap. The warm but somehow ominous sensation emanating from the pit of my stomach - instead of ignoring and soldiering through, I paid attention to it, only to notice it dissipating. The layer of tension under my skin, ready to spring back to action anytime - speaking better than any words could to how difficult it is for me to be still and „useless” - breathing a whole body breath into that. Labeling the intellectual tension between usefulness and uselessness. Examining both concepts, lingering with them.

On the other side of Sunday, realizing… I have spent a weekend mostly in the land of nothing. Getting lost in books that aren’t about something consequential or productive, napping in the sun, hiking with kids, slowly moving through my days, and most of all moving with the waves of bodily sensations and mental chatter related to the „shoulds” and „need tos”. 

Doing the very opposite of what I’d be inclined to do if I didn’t know any better. Downshifting (wink wink

Steve Schlafman

) when every part of me wants to upshift. Deadheading the ingrained way of being, so a new way of being can emerge. Supported by the judgement free encouragements from my partner - „oh definitely don’t go weeding now, just relax”.

And guess what… just two days following this glorious weekend I am back here in my Notes app writing again. Because the space I created gave me capacity to write. Because deadheading some of the old patterns gave way to a new pattern. One in which paying attention to what’s coming up means finding beauty, truth, and a sense of ease and wholeness in whatever “creeper” I’m faced with. One in which rest is rewarded with a fresh efflorescence of inspiration. 

So you see. Deadheading as a repeated practice of cutting that which stands in the way of growth, evolution, nourishment. Dancing that „capacity” dance, on a tightrope between usefulness and uselessness. Learning the same lesson again and again. (Because make no mistake I will be here again, sometime sooner or later.) Hoping that next season’s blossoms will be even more beautiful because I’ve trimmed the withered narrative and the wilting expectations.