What Bess Said
Cultivation: What a Gardener Knows
Hello love,
I went to brunch with my dear friend and magnificent human, who’s also an author and astrologer Bess Matassa, and as always, we went deep. Being seen and seeing another, oh what a blessing!
I was sharing with her about my work with the inner child, the depth of what I’m meeting in the corners of my inner home. How there’s so much new space (I wrote about waiting for the new furniture to arrive), and yet I am still meeting edges I haven’t met before and still awaiting the material/external world to meet these new deep and powerful revelations.
How some of the revelations I am experiencing, deep in my family systems, the literal family systems I was brought up in, intentionally or not, there are always systems. But only in adulthood through so much care, support and patience do we find our true selves amidst these systems.
It’s a trip, we kept saying to one another. Tucked in a corner of a cute and busy Brooklyn spot, on what I later realized was Easter Sunday. But for the 2 and half hours we were there, all it existed were the two of us. I got distracted a couple of times by the loud laughter next to me, since I was crying over my fried chicken sandwich and fries.
She asked me: what do the difficulties look like right now? I said well… the thing I am experiencing is a reconciliation with my own story from my own point of view. Not from anyone in my family, dead or alive.
I told her about the last 40 pages of Heart the Lover, her recommendation, ***spoiler alert***, where the main character gets to say a real goodbye to her love. To see him clearly and be seen. To reconcile, and how I didn’t get to have that with my mother.
I’ve accepted that, but this is important is because I realized how much of her love, our love, her presence, whatever else could be there that I missed because I was in survival, I was showing up as what was needed, the protectors had completely hijacked the wheel, and while I was loving and caring, I was also other-referencing. Always making sure everyone around me felt safe and seen. Leaving myself to keep the peace and the system we all belong to.
So the difficulties I experience now is to see my life, my inner home, my entire history from my own eyes. It’s so brand new all of the time. And of course I can’t sit here and tell you it was all bad. It never is, for any of us. We survive because there is always some good, some pleasant, some thread of kindness and aliveness pulling us through and forward.
The cosmic giggle now is to show my inner child that I have indeed been living my life, especially after my mother died, what surreal sentence to write. True and weird and strange. But also before that. But so much of my experience was managed by an inner manager-protector, that it's been hard for the inner child to feel the full depth of grief, and the full depth of aliveness. Because well, that’s the function of the protector, but it also keeps her from fully feeling the epic joys and orgasmic bliss I have been experiencing.
Hence why growing our capacity and sustaining it, takes so much deep and soft and strong and fierce work. And rest and play, and TRUST. (And what a risk it is for the protectors, who have been protecting us from any and all risk since they came online, but more on that at a later time).
Bess looked at me and said well what if it’s just a cultivation now. No longer the need to fix, or improve or better.
I was like WHAT?! I said wait, wait, wait, I have to write this down. She is so brilliant, I always take notes. I love admiring my friends, it’s so exciting. Anyway, I was shocked because it rang like a deep and necessary truth I’ve been longing FOR A LONG FUCKING TIME.
She connected this to my moon in Virgo, and my inner child, and what she needs, which means is what I need, what I, adult me, must continue to offer her/me/my life.
“To make a mandala, to cultivate an exquisite curation of a pleasurable experience with self”, she said.
So, as always the spiral spirals, the dots connect and I realized that is what I actually need, as I was saying bye to her at the entrance of the subway. We went downstairs just before you tap your card to go in because it was raining and we just needed a few more moments together.
She offered me the distinction between cultivation and betterment or improvement. And that I need more of the first, and I would say we all do.
In this culture of consumerism, need more, learn more, we always feel like we are not enough.
Cultivation always brings us something that betterment and improvement just can’t, a relationship with what’s already alive and here.
When we are always in this need to improve or better ourselves, there’s an unspoken judgment steeped in. That you are insufficient, and the “project” is the correction. It’s always toward a fixed destination or goal. Improvement feels like an engineer’s mentality: identify the deficiency/the problem, and then fix it.
This is what I sat with after leaving her and walking back to my apartment, in a perfect early spring moment, rain and all, just headphones, mantra in my ears, and my excitement to reflect and integrate what I had just experienced.
Cultivation is a gardener’s mentality. Which is perfect because seeing our lives as a garden is one of Buddhism’s main analogies for our innate capacity to work with our minds. We don’t improve a garden. We tend to it. We work with what’s already here and growing. We work with the nature, the season, the soil. We don’t work towards an idea of perfect or good, because those are concepts, and concepts can’t grow. They’re fixed by definition, that’s the whole “problem”. They can only be imposed. So we as gardeners create conditions. We let go of what stopped serving the life, the potential. We water. We wait. A gardener trusts.
Improvement treats us as a problem to be solved. Cultivation treats us as something living to be tended. Cultivation is also the perfect word for what we are actually tending to, our essential nature, already deep within, wise, already loving, already whole.
One begins with lack. The other begins with presence, with something already here worth attending to.
Betterment feels impatient, measurable, trackable, optimizable, the whole logic of self-help culture: faster, more, better, never enough. Cultivation reminds us that a garden’s roots develop in the dark, that seasons that look like nothing is happening are just as powerful and most generative. We can’t rush it. We can only stay, trust, have faith, “forget and remember”, come back, witness, and receive.
Cultivation also implies relationship, with lineage, with soil, with conditions larger than ourselves. It’s ancestral, just like us. (We tend to only look at the limitations that have been passed down, but what about all the potential, wisdom and curiosity?) What has been cultivated has been passed down, tended across generations. When we cultivate something in ourselves, we are participating in something longer than our own story.
Cultivation doesn’t assume we know what we’re growing towards. We attend, respond, trust the nature of the thing itself to show us it’s direction and its essence. There’s a real humility in that, and a real respect for who we already are. There’s a way to stay connected to ourselves and one another.
What most matters is the motivation underneath it all. Wanting to learn, grow, feel more alive, that’s not the problem. The question is what’s driving it. Curiosity and devotion to the experience itself are very different from needing to arrive somewhere to finally be enough. One is cultivation, and the other is just betterment in disguise.
I thought about all of this walking home in the rain. I thought about Bess, about my mother, about the inner child waiting not to be fixed but to be seen. About how long I've been in this work, and how much deeper it's asking me to go.
This is really about the three of us. Me, my inner child, and my mother. All in the garden. I didn’t get to say goodbye to her the way that character did. I didn’t get to see her clearly then, or be seen. Or maybe we did, and I know I have been seeing her more clearly since she passed.
Grief opens what was once closed. And maybe that’s what this is, the long slow work of turning towards my own life from my own eyes, not as a project, not as a correction. That requires a radical acceptance of all the pieces, even the ones that don't make sense to the thinking mind, especially those. As a garden I am always learning to tend. She is in the soil. So is everything else I come from. I’m always learning to trust what grows.
If something here moved you and you want more, Holy Exposure weekend retreat in Ojai, CA is in one month, and I have new space for 1:1 mentorship. Links are below.
I really am so grateful for this space to share, to feel, to make all of me visible and be seen. Thank you for reading and for being here with me.
Stay in touch, stay close!
BIGLOVE x
Moun