Growing

It's not just others we need to nurture and grow.

Growing.

A strange word, one of those words the more you look at it the more strange it appears until you start to wonder if the spelling is actually right. It’s the superfluous ‘W’ that is the problem I think.

The more things I can see growing around me, the better I feel. I bought a decidedly dead looking houseplant out of the supermarket yesterday reduced from £8.00 to 80p, I honestly don’t know if it can be saved, the poor thing is in a bad way, not one healthy leaf amongst the pale and shrivelled ones hanging on hopefully, severely overwatered and exposed to too much light, being a plant that prefers the shade, but I shall have a go to see if I can make it grow into something resembling its former self, the plant it was meant to be.

Growing anything, whether it be the smallest of houseplants to a full sized garden and anything in between requires effort. An effort that brings its own rewards in so many ways. Most people will get a thrill and feel a sense of achievement out of seeing something they have nurtured and tended, grow. The sight of a new shoot on a once dying plant makes me dance around the kitchen, it really does. Watching a seedling grow from a tiny seed popped into a tray, covered with compost, watered by my own hand, nurtured, given light, more space and eventually to see it bloom into a flower is a joy that will never dim.

When I was going through the motions of adopting my son, my social worker at the time, Pam, referred to me in one of her reports as an ‘Earth Mother’. I remember feeling quite disconcerted, thinking how could I be an earth mother if I couldn’t even have children of my own. An earth mother conjured up images of a fecund, fruitful woman surrounded by her many offspring, a woman that I was never going to be. Pam explained, in her opinion, an earth mother wasn’t necessarily a woman who was abundantly fertile in the most literal sense, but a woman who was naturally nurturing, caring and possessed a spiritually mothering temperament. I liked that and still do, I have come to realise over the years giving birth to a child isn’t the only way of becoming a mother.

Taking the time to help a living thing to grow does not just benefit the receiver. Give a lonely or lost person something to do, something that needs looking after and they have a purpose, a reason to get up out of an armchair. Water a plant, feed a goldfish, walk a dog, visit a friend in need, it really doesn’t matter what is it, it is the act of caring for something else that makes a person feel needed. They are part of something bigger than themselves.

And of course it is important that we continue to nurture and grow ourselves too. We all need to take some time to feed ourselves the human equivalent of Baby Bio every now and then, whatever that may be.

In big gestures or small, whatever we can do to stop our minds and bodies stagnating and focussing on the negatives in our lives not only helps us but usually benefits the world around us too. Come rain or shine one of the first things I do each morning is fill up the assortment of tubes and holders on the bird feeder standing a few feet away from my kitchen window. Every day while I am washing up or waiting for the kettle to boil I watch the many birds darting to and fro in and out of the hedges and the rose bushes to come and take their fill. Yesterday afternoon I was watching the resident tits and finches up to their usual antics when a great spotted woodpecker flew down out of the oak tree. The first thing I saw of him was his bright red undertail. He managed to hang on awkwardly to the peanut feeder and pecked away quite happily until he was disturbed by a bigger wood pigeon who unceremoniously barged him out of the way. I don’t know much about these beautiful birds so I Googled to read more about this new visitor. The great spotted woodpecker is the best drummer out of the three British woodpeckers, drumming at 40 beats per second. I grew, just a little bit but it felt good, a fact I didn’t know was now one I did.

I enjoy growing, learning new things, changing my mind on outdated opinions, keeping up with the times but lately I have been experiencing a little problem on the growth front. If you have been reading my posts for a while you will be aware I am becoming more and more interested in poetry. This new found love has come later in life and after an initial spell of enthusiasm, including joining a writing group, a new poetry club and various outings to poetry readings, I realised a few days ago I am spending a lot of time writing poems but I am not sharing them. Why is that? Goodness I wish I was a psychoanalyst sometimes. Maybe it is because after listening to other people I don’t think what I am writing is good enough. Perhaps subconsciously I am thinking what’s the point, I’ve left it too long and I’ll never get anywhere, nobody will ever find me, there are already thousands of poets out there, all better than me, blah, blah blah. And maybe I am afraid that because I am veering off into something new all my wonderful subscribers are going to abandon me. I am trying to get my head around that. Of course I don’t want to lose readers but if poetry is a path I really want to take, to learn about, get involved in, improve and hopefully revel in, should I just take the plunge, lose some of my existing subscribers but hopefully gain new ones on my new poetry path.

In between writing the last paragraph and this one, my husband came into the room and asked me what I was up to so I told him about the poetry hiccups and my faltering self belief. I won’t bother to tell you what he said exactly, but the word confidence (more precisely lack of it) was mentioned quite a few times.

So on that note, here is a poem I wrote recently after reading doctors in Gaza were so short of supplies some were down to using one glove while they were treating horrendous injuries. It moved me to tears, prompting this poem “Welcome Home”.

Welcome Home

Curious birds hummed in the distance
deaf to the call of the swirling flocks 
announcing their annual arrival. 
The skies were not as they remembered,
no uplifting currents to carry them
softly silent beyond the clouds,
no playful sweep swoop of welcoming swifts. 
October air, sweetened with cloves
and cinnamon faded to a memory as the dust of yesterday’s 
houses settled wearily on ragged feathers,
filling tiny lungs with spiteful heat. 
Crusted black eyes shed tears on the rubble
where once they built their nests,
parched throats screeched
into a night no star could make bright or safe way guide.
A bird fell, spent.
A doctor pulled on her last glove
to mend a broken wing.
Welcome home.

I recorded the poem for those who prefer to listen.

So, onward and upward, less feeling sorry for myself and more of a can-do attitude from now on. A new mindset is needed.

I imagine a lot of fellow substack writers, people like me, the little guys, feel overwhelmed every now and then. I have read before that people can experience hitting a six month wall when the initial energy and excitement wears off, the opening flurry of subscribers stops and numbers don’t move for weeks on end (or perhaps that’s just me!). Giving up can start to feel like an easy option.

But, I need to remind myself why I started on Substack in the first place. Because I didn’t only want to write, I wanted to grow. And I do feel like I am growing even though it may not in the direction I imagined, but what an adventure.

With love,

Lindsey x

Thank you to everyone who reads or listens to my newsletters, I appreciate how much stuff we all get bombarded with these days so for someone to take ten minutes out of their day to be here is very humbling.