Having a profession in which one can earn periodic sabbaticals is a massive privilege. For all the other ways a life in academia can be challenging,[*] this is a benefit for which I’m deeply grateful.
After nearly twenty years in the profession, this is my first multi-quarter sabbatical, and I’m vigilant to mind it carefully, to not squander the time, and to do whatever I can to make use of the Air & Light & Time & Space it gives me to finish old projects and move the needle on some fresh ones.
But, three months into what I’m considering the first quarter of it, where I’m just getting the pump primed and I still have departmental obligations, I’m also reminded that sabbatical time can be a bit psychologically delicate. Sabbatical time is different from regular professor time, in more and less obvious ways. The calendar opens up enormously, and becomes much more flexible. At the same time, there’s a low-humming pressure to produce, but production requires creation, and creation requires contemplation and reading, absorbing and gestating ideas, drafting, scrapping, rethinking, and usually a fair bit of freaking out before things start to find their true form. Creative activity involves process, and a lot of showing up, even when we don’t feel like it.
There’s also always this crosscurrent: the low hum of creation pressure competes with the perpetual temptation to do all the things we don’t have time to do normally. Deal with the backlogged vet and dentist and dermatology appointments. Take the dog on more than perfunctory walks through the neighborhood. Read a novel! Use the freaking membership to the art museum, for once. Visit the parents. Sleep. But each time we indulge something in the long-neglected category, the hum of what we’re supposed to be doing can get louder, until it’s thrumming in the back of the brain and it’s hard to enjoy any of the other things, which seem to be taking time from the main thing.
On top of all that, if you’re a mostly solo scholar, as I am, you go from the frenetic, high-contact pace of teaching, with tons of student, colleague, and staff contact daily, to inordinate amounts of time spent alone with your thoughts (and fears).
Fortunately, this sabbatical I seem to have discovered something that seems to be helping me manage the crosscurrents and (perhaps; we’ll see) helping minimize some of the psychological stumbling blocks of sabbatical time. I created a physical project that runs in tandem with the sabbatical period of spring to spring, one full year.
I’m building a pollinator garden.
I’ve lost track of exactly what prompted me to start the thing. Certainly I was aware, in a general sense, that pollinator populations, especially native bees, have been in decline from loss of habitat, pollution, and pesticides from industrial agriculture. I knew, based on some native xeriscaping we’ve cultivated in our front yard, that bees are attracted to some of these plants, but that I see more bees some years than others. And after reading something about the total resource waste of grass lawns, it occurred to me that the north section of our backyard lawn is hard to maintain in the summer anyway, because the searing Colorado sunshine tends to blast it into straw. Why waste water and time to keep it up?
So I did a little research, had my strong wife help me carve out a dirt oval from the middle of the lawn, and took a very expensive field trip in April to a nursery in Boulder that specializes in native plants, and helpfully provides little signs to indicate which ones are bee, butterfly, and hummingbird attractors. Armed with these very basics, I set to work arranging the placement of scores of flowering plants, three bee-friendly shrubs, and a little peach tree I named Amanda. I also used some beautiful deadwood from a tree we had to cut down last year, as garden features and potential areas for bee homes. (Most native Colorado bees are singular, not hiving, so they sleep and build egg nests in dirt and wood burrows.)
Spring unfolded in fits and starts, and I worked to build a new routine with my work, writing every morning and setting goals each week to move the needle on at least one project on my sabbatical list. But I took my breaks in the backyard, puttering in the garden and watching the plants root themselves and begin their slow stretch to the sky. Only days after they were in, a spring storm blanketed the young plants in eight inches of wet snow. Then days of melting warmth, and, two weeks after Mother’s Day, when we’re supposed to be safe from freezes, a series of hailstorms pelted them with ice marbles in the middle of the night. The babies emerged tattered but steadfast.
By early June, six weeks into the project, I had been keeping my own promise to write at least something, even if it was mostly musing and seemingly going nowhere, 5-6 days a week. I was starting to remember what it felt like to show up daily and get words on a page. The brain crud was slowly clearing from several quarters of overwork and I was beginning to recognize my back-burnered projects as things I actually want to complete.
Then the bees started showing up.
The hailstorms stripped most of the white blossoms from the mock orange shrubs, but the Rocky Mountain Penstemon spires started sprouting deep purple fluted flowers in early June. The first bees, attracted by a nearby mature flowering catmint I planted a few years back, wandered over to the penstemon and nudged themselves inside. Soon I noticed not only that there were at least two distinct varieties of regular-sized bees, one probably honeybees from a hive nearby, the other a brighter yellow-and-black type, but also that they were joined by tiny sweat bees, a quarter of the size of regular bees, and what I guessed were black carpenter bees.
In less than six weeks, I went from thinking of all bees as, well, just bees, to being able to recognize at least four different species in my own yard, and that was before the enormous bumblebees swooped in like helicopters this week and wedged their fat, buzzing bodies into the salvia blossoms.
One of my main goals for this pump-priming first quarter of the sabbatical has been to pay attention to the conditions that “organically” inspire me to work—organic in the sense that the drive comes from a place of curiosity, desire, play, conviction, or some other authentic impulse, rather than from only discipline or the kind of task-mongering that eventually makes me rebel from boredom. And the pollinator garden has been quite the teacher on this front.
The metaphors basically write themselves. The soil needs to be prepped with compost and oxygen, turning the dirt over and loosening it up for planting. New ideas are often born from scraps of older, half-developed thoughts planted in the soil of practice, training and trial and error. If I’m starting new projects, there’s a certain amount of mixing it up, making a few good guesses about what might take root, dropping some ideas and walking away for awhile to let the sun shine on them. I’m reminded to let it be messy and loose for awhile. A couple weeks in, I moved a healthy babies breath from my veggie garden planter into the pollinator garden, and for a week it looked like I had probably killed the thing. Maybe I had gotten overconfident; the poor plant was slumped over and blanching gray like an old man. I kept watering it, though, and mentally holding space for it to recover, and maybe even laying hands on the thing one morning when I thought all was lost. On about the eighth day I could see that it had started to straighten back up. It’ll probably bloom this week.
Transplanting is not unlike taking some primary material and trying to analyze it through a new literature. You don’t always know if it’s going to stand up on its own, but if you pay attention to what it needs, it has a decent chance. If it doesn’t survive, though, maybe it’s time to toss into the compost. And sometimes fertilizing the damned soil—reading other people, taking in content from any sources that inspire, is more productive than just muscling it with will and ego.
Maintaining a garden requires a similar kind of intention to keeping up a slate of original projects. I have to watch the stuff cropping up that doesn’t belong, and weed out what’s dead or belongs to some other system, like the sumac seeds that keep trying to root new ghetto trees anywhere they can. Sometimes old projects need to be trashed, too, so I turn the dirt over, plant other ideas and see what grows, and under what conditions. Making time to just watch what’s happening, observe how things evolve. The bees, for instance need access to water, so I’ve put out large saucers with marbles in them that the bees can stand on as they drink, so as to avoid drowning. I have to attend to the water daily, but if I sit on a chair at the end of the day, I can also watch the bees come and go from these little oases.
More exploring, more wayfinding, less “to do”ing. More wandering, less directing. More letting, less forcing. More permission to get weird with it; less muscling it to be something. More noticing what practices spark ideas and connections, and doing those things; less crating myself and expecting goodness to follow.
[*] Being underpaid relative to educational level, endless and growing administrative tasks invented from on high, faculty “governance,” publish or perish pressures, need I continue?