Scorched earth
Planting seeds for new growth.
Somewhere in the middle of a difficult season, you look around and in desperation realise the ground around you has been scorched. Everything familiar is gone. The routines, the relationships, the quiet certainties that formed you have been reduced to ash and bare earth. And your first instinct is to scream “what just happened?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about scorched earth lately.
There’s a practice in land management called controlled burning, where you deliberately set fire to a field to clear it. Not to destroy it. To remove the accumulated dead matter and invasive growth; the thorns and weeds that were crowding everything else out. Fire looks like destruction. From a distance, it looks like waste. But turn it around and what you’ve got is possibility for renewal. You don’t always choose the burning, I certainly didn’t, but sometimes it just happens. Sometimes the universe, or God, or whatever word sits least awkwardly in your mouth, steps in and does it for you. You’re left standing on scorched ground thinking: I was fine. I was comfortable. I loved my life. Except you weren’t. You were putting your roots into something that couldn’t or no longer wanted to hold you. What looked like comfort was, you’d just stopped noticing the thistles.
I think a lot of people are standing on that ground right now. It looks like a wasteland. It feels like starting from nothing, when it’s too late in the season to regrow, but that cleared ground is actually fertile for planting new seeds, new growth will emerge, free from weeds and toxicity. You are planting now, even in the middle of not knowing what comes next. The conversations you’re having (even with yourself). The small decisions to try something, to reach out and keep walking. Those are seeds. You can’t always see what they’ll become and that’s not a deficiency - that’s just the nature of seeds. They do their work quietly. Some spring up, some never emerge.
And roots grow in the dark.
That’s not a metaphor (well maybe a little), it’s how it works. The root system of a tree - the thing that will nourish it and hold it through a storm, will anchor itself against the wind that tears other things out of the ground. The roots develop underground out of sight, in conditions that you can’t see above ground. You don’t get to know how strong your roots are. You only find out when the storm comes and you’re still standing. I am that tree. YOU are that tree.
Somewhere there are other trees that are standing proud amongst scorched earth. Trees that look independent and self-contained, stoic against the skyline -but below the surface, they are not alone. Root systems talk to each other. They share nutrients. They send distress signals. A tree under stress will be quietly sustained by the trees around it through networks it took time. Stumps can be kept alive for centuries by the other trees around it. What looks like solitude is, underground, something more like community.
You are not as alone as the scorched ground suggests. One day you’ll be a tree among trees, standing in a beautiful meadow of your choosing. A new network of friendship and family that YOU grew into something.
This is only your winter phase. Winter is not death, it’s the season that makes the rest of the year possible. The question isn’t whether something new will grow. It will. You’ve learnt from the past, now it’s time to grow your future. Change is always possible. The question is what kind of gardener you’ll choose to be?
Adam x
