The old Zen Koan appears to hold true: The way you do one thing, is the way you do everything.
To help me get out of my office once in a while, I am completing coursework for a Permaculture Design program. For the moment, that means I’ve developed a number of perennial nurseries throughout my yard. I have three city lots, and the long-term plan is to cover about 60% in food-bearing perennials (a food forest of berries, fruit trees, and perennial herbs and greens). I’ve got a working design on paper; it will be years in the making.
For now I have these “islands” of new perennial plantings. Next year, I’ll split many of them or grow starts from seed to build more planted areas throughout the property. For now it’s really scrappy looking. Disorganized. Very few trails between each island or defined borders between planting area and lawn. It’s rough!
This reminds me a lot of the early stages in book-writing. Lots of disjointed scenes, no sense of connection or build between them yet. Many unknowns. I don’t know about you, but I love that feeling—that time period of sheer possibility and process.
I’m so thankful we don’t have a homeowner’s association judging these unfinished projects in our yard. And equally thankful no one judges my books by their “process piles” all over my office floor!
I’ve tried taming my “process-writing” style. I’ve tried organizing stacks neatly across the dining room table. I’ve tried tidy rows of folding tables. But nothing takes the place of literally walking along the length of a book on the floor, stepping over the rows and islands of content, marking them for expansion like fruit, pulling unneeded scenes like weeds, or moving whole sections like transplants.
I’m a process-writer, and a process gardener too. No hope of changing.
As the other surely over-worked Zen saying goes, It is what it is!