Trying to Plant Perennials

On gestation, regeneration, and the creative process

Cornstalks by Jake Marquez

The other day I had a dream that my cat gave birth to two kittens. At first glance, they looked like small, healthy versions of my cat, but upon further inspection, I realized that their abdomens were not properly fused, and their organs will spilling out of them. The kittens would not live.

A few weeks before that, I had a dream that I had a baby. The pregnancy came on suddenly, and without warning. I didn’t know I was pregnant, and suddenly I was in a hospital, being knocked out so the baby could be delivered via cesarean section. I had only labored for a moment before this happened — the pain quickly replaced by oblivion. When I woke, I saw the baby, and it was beastly. There was something terribly wrong with this baby and immediately I knew that it was because I hadn’t given it the proper care within utero — I hadn’t planned for it, considered it, or even noticed that it existed. There was no gestation — only birth. The baby was just suddenly there. In the dream, I wanted nothing to do with it.

The second dream came around the time that I began drafting my novel — which, surprise! I’ve drafted my first novel! I knew upon waking that this dream was trying to communicate something important to me: if I was going to bring this “baby” into the world, I needed to allow it to gestate properly. I needed to nourish it into being and go through the labor pains to bring it into the world. This was not something I could rush, force, or expect to be easy.

The first dream, while different, holds a similar symbol — an unexpected, impossible (in the case of my neutered cat) pregnancy, which no one was prepared for. The kittens did not gestate properly — they were not viable.

I interpret those kittens as representing the two “children” I am bringing into the world: this project, Death in The Garden, and my trilogy of novels. It’s clear to me that a lot of my subconscious psychic energy is fixated upon their development, trying to communicate to me the importance of nourishing these things before they are let out into the world.

This has led me to an inner conflict that I have consistently grappled with since this project began — the quickened, feverish pace of culture, and the need for gestation for proper creation.

This project has taken, at the time of this writing, 18 times longer than we anticipated. It has taken us on an incredibly unique journey, but for most of it, we have stressed about not getting it out quickly enough. Even though time and again, we’ve been grateful for the timing of everything, realizing that only now do we have the skills and knowledge to actually produce these short films, we still find ourselves bemoaning the fact that it has taken so long. If only we had been producing these videos at the time we shot them, if only, if only — we could be so much further along! Moments of clarity come through, and we realize how terrible those first iterations were — a beastly baby we would want nothing to do with. Still, the pace of modernity says now, now, now! Even though we are only two, very limited, very human, people, we have a hard time allowing for the fact that things take time to do right. Certain things can’t be forced, commodified, and created at all costs.

While I am conscious of the need to practice intentionality and slowness when it comes to understanding our role in nature, I find that I don’t extend that same understanding to myself as a limited, creative human being. I expect myself to produce and produce, and like a field ravaged by too much tilling, I find myself needing to be left fallow. The problem is, the land, and my creativity, don’t need to be left fallow — they need to be treated in a regenerating way to begin with.

I have trapped myself in a cycle where I am expecting myself to produce enough shorter-form “content” at a rapid enough pace to latch on to algorithmic success, which I simply can’t achieve. I admire so many extremely prolific writers, and I often chastise myself for not being more like them in spite of my very real limitations, such as housing and the need to make a living outside of these two passion projects. Am I just lazy? Am I just dumb? Am I too much of a perfectionist? What I have struggled to make space for is the possibility that my creative process takes a bit more time, and needs space to grow. Rather than accepting that, I’ve allowed myself to get stressed to the point where I can’t create anything anyway! I deplete the soils of my mind in my panic to create content, and then nothing can grow.

Even though there is this myth that Substack somehow isn’t social media, it embodies all of the same pitfalls of other social media networks — you need to create x amount of content and write about the most timely or sensational things to get picked up by the algorithm to get likes and subscribes and become a success. And now that there are so many people on this platform, it’s even harder for people to get noticed. So you have the same race to the bottom that all social media platforms ultimately get sucked into, albeit in a more long-form, ad-free, thoughtful, and considerate way. Nevertheless, this is still the attention economy — we’re all still competing to be the most attention-grabbing, the most interesting, and the most productive, a quantitative rather than qualitative judgement.

In order to succeed as a writer, YouTuber, or modern creator of any kind within the attention economy, so the story goes, is to produce quantities of content because the measure of success is time + eyeballs. Similar to our modern agricultural system, most people find that they need to produce the content equivalent of dent-corn to achieve this. The world is then flooded with a surplus of corn-fed content, and the people who are trying to be thoughtful, slow, and conscientious with their creations have to somehow compete.

The thing is, I don’t want to produce cash crops — ravaging the ecosystem of my mind, trying to produce to stay relevant, catching the best algorithmic wave. I am trying to plant perennials.

The expectation of constant quantitative production is like a herbicide to the foliage of my mind. These perennials, the short films and my novels and essays, they take time to gestate — a lot of time.

One of the themes of the past year has been recognizing that people cannot know anything until they are ready to know it. You know what I mean — we all have the experience of telling someone the same thing again and again and then one day they hear it from someone else and suddenly it clicks for them. Seriously. We all do this. Anyway, this is the same for scripts, for scenes, for novel ideas. They come into our orbit when they are ready to, and we are ready to receive them. I haven’t published an essay in a while because in all of my drafts, there is something missing — some treasure hiding in one of the books on my shelf, in a conversation I’ve yet to have, a movie I’ve never seen, or an epiphany that ties it all together — something that will make that essay complete. It’s all percolating in the ether around me, waiting to be concretized. I could technically publish them right now, but it would be like feeding you the first fruits of a baby tree.

It’s a tricky balance between showing up every day to patiently be in the creative process and truly forcing it — tilling the earth, fertilizing with chemicals, and irrigating the land. The creative process feels like tending a garden of discovery, whereas forcing yourself to make content feels like standing in a monoculture where not even an insect can survive. Nothing new or interesting can take root in these degraded soils.

Cornfield by Jake Marquez

All of us who are trying to make a difference (and there are many, many people on Substack doing this) are being forced to plant trees in seas of corn stalks, and it’s almost impossible for them to take root. The culture wants the quick, hyper-palatable kibble, and we’re trying to make something different, but often we’re using the same strategies of production that degrade us. I’m only now realizing that I am, and have, played a role in this very environment that I am criticizing. I haven’t been able to see the connection between the way the culture treats my mind and the way it treats the land, and how those things reinforce each other. Our modern emphasis on efficiency and productivity can be expressed in so many ways, and only now am I recognizing the incongruence within myself.

I am constantly expecting depleted land to give me what I need, and rather than replenishing it with more creative energy, I’ve just continued to till, hoping to find some vein of fecundity. But where does creative energy actually come from? It comes from connection, curiosity, slowness, and introspection — none of which can be achieved if I’m constantly trying to make cheap content to keep people’s attention. If I want what I produce to be nourishing, why do I allow the pressure to make kibble to influence my mind? I know from experience that qualitative and quantitative productivity and regenerating systems are not mutually exclusive, and this year I hope to find that synergy in my creative life. The inner ideal, I believe, must reflect the outer ideal.

But this isn’t just about me. Your attention is the final frontier, and everyone is trying to vie for it, capitalize upon it, steal it. I want to avoid playing into this to the best of my ability. When you are reading my work or watching our videos, we want you to feel like your attention has been respected — that this precious resource you have, that which marks the moments of your one, finite life is not being treated as a commodity either. You deserve better than kibble — you deserve living kittens.

My novel trilogy, essays, and, most importantly, the short films we are making are perennials that require a tremendous amount of tending in order for them to grow and reach their potential, and they are the things that we believe will be the most valuable to you. We’re so grateful to have support from people on Substack and Patreon — some of whom have been supporting us for years. We have always hoped that people implicitly understood that that support is really for the films and anything else we produce would just be a bonus. I think I’ve confused myself a lot over the years and fallen into the frenetic energy of the content trap, feeling like if we don’t produce enough short-form content quickly enough as we’re creating the long-form content, it’s almost as if we’re not producing anything at all, but that has never been true. I’m hoping this year, as we start the year with finishing this second video as quickly and properly as we can, I can let go of that feeling that strips the soils of my mind. Trying to plant trees in a monoculture of corn just isn’t working.

Healing our relationship to ourselves and the earth will take time, and I think the stories that will play a positive role must take time, too. The urgency of modernity is a byproduct of its dysfunction. The quest for endless creative production is analogous to how we’ve treated the earth as a resource to mine, farm, and exploit. There’s a reason so many movies and shows are reboots, remakes, or feel like they were written by AI nowadays — it is the factory farming of storytelling, one of our most unique and powerful faculties as a creature. The outer degradation of land and water perfectly mirrors our inner degradation — our waning attention spans, our lack of motivation, our feelings of meaninglessness.

As Daniel Griffith recently wrote, “Storytellers will be held accountable for our times.” On the most basic level, it’s simply true that storytellers are the mythmakers of our time, and they — we — wield a disproportionate amount of cultural power, and that is a responsibility that needs to be taken seriously. Any and all content that is produced today, whether in print, film, or on social media, is part of the weaving of our modern mythology. Entertainment and amusement is not a neutral act — it never has been.

This quote is also true on multiple levels: if we storytellers repeat the same pattern of over-production at the expense of quality, we’re reinforcing a mindset of over-consumption. If we don’t give ourselves time to really think about what we create, then we will create things that don’t encourage others to think. If we aren’t mindful with our attention, we can easily fall into the trap of stealing others’ attention for our own benefit. It’s a strange world we live in — this world made in our very dysfunctional image.

The only thing we can do is try to regenerate the inner landscape as much as we can: first, by allowing time and space for emergence. Second, by tending what arises. And third, by making sure that what we produce is truly ready to be nourishing to whoever eats it.

We hope you will stick around this year as we work to produce quality films, essays, and now novels. Our goal is to bring real value, and your support allows us to. We appreciate your continued support, and we hope you have many blessings in the new year.

Thank you for your attention.

Written by Maren Morgan