For the Birds: Worms, plants, knowing, and Autism
"It’s incredibly difficult to achieve real outcomes when you’re seeking root information, but you're only looking at the leaves." Plus writing prompts for vertebrates.
Thanks for being here! I’m on a mission to serve others through writing & mentorship, and I’m doing this work as a self-employed Autistic human. Your support has a bigger impact on my life than you likely know. Please know it! When you can, thank you for reading closely, sharing widely, and upgrading to a paid subscription.
Reminder: My workshop, “Partnering with your Creativity,” is happening tomorrow at 11am PST. It’s not too late to sign up, and replays will be available. Snag a spot here!
Today’s letter ends with:
Writing prompts for vertebrates
The Zoom link for tonight’s Resiliency Circle gathering
Last night’s heavy rain led M and I to sleep in this morning, assuming we’d have to skip our a.m. walk, the one we try to take before he rushes off to the library and I “clock on,” amorphously, to begin work from home.
Except we awoke to mostly blue skies and a cinematic quality of light—not the pink-yellow of full spring or the blue-gray of dawn, but the silvery glow of a post-rain Pacific Northwest morning, when the ground is soaking wet, and the light doesn’t engulf you so much as come down in laminated sheets.
Maybe I’m just feeling romantic. Last night we watched Maestro, and if you think art can’t be sincere and complex at the same time, then this is the movie that will undo your assumptions.
(I’m also a little furious: that Carey Mulligan’s turn as Felicia Montealegre went unrecognized last award season, while Oppenheimer, a 3-hour beach off shot like a trailer, received more accolades than I care to count.)
Anyway. Stirred by the light, and the buoyancy we always feel for a day or two after seeing a good film, we walked.
First eastward on 13th, toward the middle school, and then down, which is also north. The starlings and scrub jays were aplenty, crackling and yelling respectively. A man with a tall Irish Wolfhound passed us at a jogging clip. A stern looking mother picked up her daughter and her daughter’s friend in a pickup truck. The lupine and daffodils made lush appearances, as did a single stunning tree in a neighbor’s front yard, flowering with a million tiny white petals. Cherry Blossom? Dogwood?
Sometimes it’s easier for me to love something than to know what that something is.
Then, there were the worms.
They come out in droves after the rain, something about vibrations and the ease of moving across asphalt and pavement when it’s wet. I gasped with glee at each one. I am consistently moved by non-human living things—every chicken, every dog, every spider—and I proceeded to do what I often do, a very Sarah thing, by “rescuing” the worms one by one, transferring them onto the safety of the grass. One worm was, I swear, longer than a ruler, and my hands were so slimy after touching him that I ran back to the house to wash them before going any further.
Is it stewardship, or interference? A well-intentioned lack of trust in nature’s own self-reliance?
Whatever it was, a broader truth quickly halted my actions: There were simply too many worms for me to move them all.
Here lies an example of one of the more obsessive manifestations of my joyful Autistic brain: A nearly overwhelming sense of love and compassion for animals and creatures. And yes, plants; and, to a much smaller but still marked degree, inanimate objects. And if I am not care-full, by which I mean full of care, my care itself can boil over into compulsion.
How does language even work?! Do I need more of my care, a fullness of it, or less care? Because it sounds like I am saying both.
I am saying both.
My care for plants in particular is the very thing that gets in the way of my being good at caring for them.
By which I mean it boils over, turns into that other thing in a split second. A combination of worry + a lack of cognitive understanding (something a year of Master Gardener training still could not resolve). Nor do I have a green thumb, aka plant intuition.
I don’t have intuition in most areas of my life, to be honest, something that others have at times tried to talk me out of—of course you have intuition, Sarah!—but which I am coming to recognize as a real and acceptable part of how I am.1
When I know things, I know them. My intuition is strong around creativity, and often around animals, too. (Maybe not the worms.) My empathy—a related state, I would argue—is nearly overflowing, and almost always.
But when I don’t know: I. don’t. know. It is genuine. Sincere. What does knowing feel like? I have asked my therapist on multiple occasions. Barring the few most well established facets of my character and morality, knowing isn’t a knee-jerk experience for me. I need time, and a lot of information, more than what some people may find reasonable. Sometimes I need to hear the information more than once, and it helps to have it written down.
It’s not that the knowing isn’t in me somewhere, it’s that it isn’t always here. Often, I see it coming from far away, like a dot of light that belongs to a slow-moving train. But I live at the other end of the tracks, which means I must wait for the train to arrive.2
Here’s another thing about plants + knowing: A lot of people say that a good plant for beginning gardeners is a succulent. But that’s really not true. If your mums or your impatiens need water, they will wilt. You will see it. Give them water? They’ll perk right back up. You can observe the effect you are having on the plant, which helps you understand something about the plant’s needs and, most importantly, the shape of your relationship with it.
But underwater an echeveria? You will not know it’s suffering until its leaves begin to crinkle and drop. And overwater it? The damage can be irreversible, yet you won’t know something’s wrong for days or weeks, the worst of it happening below the surface, in the roots.
I keep thinking about this phrase, one that I might’ve made up: Autistic Cactus. That that’s what I am.
An exterior too easily summarized, given all that’s going on inside me and at root-level.
Bearer of a hyper-sensitivity that is always happening, but does not reveal itself within a “normal” span of time.
Someone affected by the world in ways that don’t readily show.
And because of all of these common misunderstandings, someone who seems like a blunter plant than she really is, her needs—the fulfillment or negligence of them—sometimes taking place on a microscopic level.
Invisible, sure, but only to the naked eye.
Things that can’t be seen by the naked eye:
The healthy bacteria that lives on our skin.
So many of the details that help you identify the birds you love.
Magnetic fields, which play a vital role in both the Earth’s protective ozone layer and the electricity we rely on every day.
Neptune, the planet of collective consciousness and dreams.
Theta waves, indicative of a heightened state of relaxation and/or most purring cats.
The feeling of love when you’ve loved the same person for a very long time.
Below the surface, deep in the roots, is where much of my Autism has lived.