Notes from the garden; the power of silence

...and the story of the humble runner bean.

Hi! I’m Anna from The Burnout Rebellion 🌊 🍂. I’m here to help you navigate the pivot moments in your life. Whether it’s burnout, searching for your purpose or heading in a new direction, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.

You know when you hit that pivot moment in your life, that moment when you know your life has to change? Well, I am living through that right now. On the 19th of July this year, I left my job with no plan other than to make my 5 and 85-year-old self proud. I share personal essays about my own journey, particularly my return to writing, research and nature as well as providing tips, interviews and podcasts from others who’ve navigated this path. Join me as I share with you not only how you can change your life, but how you can also find a tribe of people doing just that. Welcome to the rebellion where nothing is impossible.

What subscribers received recently:

• A chance to discuss with others what values mean to them, helping us all navigate this journey ahead.

• A call to join The Burnout Rebellion.

• How to ritualise your life including 5 ways to get closer to connection and ways to re-enchant your life.

What’s coming up:

• Earth’s medicine; Building a seasonal altar

• Opinion piece; Do our schools need to change?

• The Burnout Rebellion: Building the foundation of your rebellion.

Want to learn more about what I do? Click here to see my hero post.

Welcome to this section of my Substack called ‘Notes from the garden’. Since giving up my job, the garden has provided me with the space to explore, to think, and to tap back into a deeper wisdom. There is a certain solace that we can find in nature that we cannot find anywhere else, and the garden brings this to me. This has formed a huge part of my rebellion against a conventionally lived life. So follow me as I go from supermarket shopper and absolute garden novice, to growing and creating. If you are a grower or a wannabe grower, I would love to hear your thoughts/tips/support in the comments. Anna xx

Silence

I felt that she was not showing me one last sunset on purpose, for fear my heart would shatter into pieces. In the grey humidity of the flat, she silently whispered, go.

Would the new dwellers see what I had seen? Gaping fireplaces ripe for candles in winter and flowers in spring. The magpies resting on the rooftops, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. Cracks in the walls, cobwebs gathered in chimneys. The groaning floorboard, unable to take almost any weight without gasping for air.

The room boomed with silence.

I remained. Still, unflinching, unable to take a breath. Encapsulating this moment, protected forever, in this space, and within my soul.

Tick, tick, tick. Time was moving on. I must go or remain rooted in this place forever. Staying a version of myself that has long been blurring at the edges.

As I filled the space with music for one last time, memories fluttered across my eyelids. Deep kisses, laughter, cries out to God, stacks of blueberry pancakes. A Christmas tree. I dance on the wooden floors, jive and hop round the living room. The neighbours look on. I will say goodbye to you with love. The first place I could call my own. Fireworks of grief, joy, safety and home, set alight in my body. I prayed to feel it all.

Saudade¹. The love that remains. A Portuguese word meaning the melancholic nostalgia left behind by a beloved. As the music stops, and the echoes of an empty room return I land here, and hold the feeling in my heart.

A fly who has silently given up on life, rests in the corner of the window pane.

I heave the last suitcase through the door at home. Dad appears, already joking about how his garage is filled to the rafters with my books. I sigh, and go to check on the runner beans.

Sitting outside on the bench, dappled with the early September rain, the cool breeze reminds me that autumn is here. Beside me the late runner beans continue to grow, garish red flowers, insistent on staying. Give up. I breathe. It is autumn. In defiance, she stands proudly, hints of perfectly formed arcs show themselves. Will they ever end? This onslaught, they never stop. In this moment, I realise my own ending is colouring the ending of hers. Her last dance in the silence.

The late runner beans in the early morning sun.

Since giving up my job, the garden has provided me with the space to explore, to think, and to tap back into why I am here. I read a piece by Yung Pueblo that said “Why are we here at a time when there is so much despair?”

because you answered the call. The earth signalled for heroes, and the heavens sent forth the ones who were most ready to grow and unleash their unconditional love. You're here to shine the light of your own healing, to offer the world the gift of your balance and peace.

I balk and tut at the word hero in my current state of melancholy. But there is a certain solace that we find in nature that is not found anywhere else. Whether I believe myself to be a hero or not, I soften at the edges, inhaling this autumnal light, and the beans stand strong in their act of resistance. I feel soothed. Perhaps there is a reason after all and this adventure I am on now is to uncover that very reason. The garden has formed a huge part of my rebellion against a conventionally lived life, and as I sit with the runner beans in her own rebellion against the seasons, I feel I can breathe again. She grew under my hand, my care. To nurture a soul into and out of this life can only be deemed heroic.

The humble runner bean

The jokes have ensued all summer; do you need anymore runner beans? We joke with a grin and joyful bump to any neighbour, friend or family member that enters our home. Don’t talk to me about runner beans they’ll say, the fridge is packed, they’re taking up half the freezer. We’ll definitely have some for Christmas.

I have never been sure whether I actually like the taste of runner beans, do they even taste of anything? Apologies to all gardeners out there who love them. Perhaps it is my own tastebuds, numbed with the sheer volume of sugar and salt in non-home-grown foods. It will take me time to enjoy the raw beauty of the bean. At the peak of summer where we were literally overwhelmed I called out to my Substack friends for help, what are you doing with all this excess? All these runner beans? The recipes suggested were simply delightful and are in the note below if you are interested. Do feel free to add your own. After 6 Sundays in a row of a roast with side of beans I am definitely looking for something different!

I was sure the runner bean would be the fool proof vegetable. I wanted something easy to start with so I could pat myself on the back and tell myself that I was clever. How easy this growing lark really was. Turn into a gardening expert overnight and be able to tell the world I just know the land. But alas it was not to be. Slugs, high winds, and the sheer ginormous height of some of them meant I actually had to tend to them. I had to observe them closely every day for black fly, holes in the leaves, and overripe vegetables, picking them so that more may grow and so they did not rot where they stood. I learnt lessons within lessons. How to nurture, how to notice. Spotting slight changes in the leaves that weren’t there the day before, notice the settling of a hidden snail. Knowing when a bean had reached its absolute peak potential, or the moment it had passed and become too stringy.

In the whirlwind that was my summer, the runner bean became a constant. Dad’s health faltered, then rose once again. It seemed invariably tied to the tide, whether the tide meant that bass were more fishable, whether the sea was clear or if our fishing coincided with a sunrise. More often than not I felt that his health was bound to the Earth, her crests, her troughs. Then again aren’t we all? As the Earth gets sicker so do we, as the nights become darker we look to retreat to the light inside of ourselves. Tend to the inner fire when the lights are out. Moments in the garden brought him back to life. Collecting the pears for a crumble, the delight that our tree had somehow thrived but our neighbours had not. There were times, such as these I could barely believe we had been told he was now terminal. That we were looking at months and not years.

Dad’s delight at the pear crop this summer.

Dad has always grown runner beans. Every Sunday from June, our Auntie would appear, and Dad would always supply her with her vegetables for a Sunday roast. She declared it as her favourite vegetable. It was a given that Dad would grow the beans, and my Grandmother would sit, with a wide pink sun hat on her head, and dutifully prepare each bean, removing the strings, and slicing them at an angle, ready to be frozen for the oncoming winter. At 94, she is passed this phase in her life, but still alive and well, as her son, battles a more untimely mortality. Life flashes before me as I see him settle in his chair. His time to cut the beans has come. I wonder how long it will be before it is mine.

This portal I find myself existing in, as my life changes, and grief engulfs my every day, I no longer understand time. I exist in a place where both my past and present live alongside one another. Ghosts, shadows of the past, wait in the wings until I no longer know what time even is. In the clear nights of autumn I find myself staring at the stars in awe. The stars still seem topsy turvy to me, I do not know which way is up and which way is down. I am told on certain evenings, we can see the Andromeda galaxy. It’s light has taken 2.5 million years to reach Earth, so we are seeing the galaxy at a time before even human life has evolved, and in that I am comforted. I daydream what has happened on that galaxy since then, what lives have been lived, how many times the atoms within stars have been recycled again and again. How lucky we must be to be able to see the past, when the stars in that galaxy cannot.

What does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite eternal universe? asks Brian Cox², Professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. I remember the times I used to refute spirituality for science and science for spirituality, but they are one and the same. In this form, we are the universe coming together to experience itself. In all other forms, it cannot think or feel. It cannot chart the waves of rage or grief, ecstasy or wonder. Feel the horror or delight in it’s own creation. But here, being human, we allow the universe to experience itself for a microsecond of its seemingly eternal life. We are her gift, her hero.

And as the quiet descends in the garden once again and the beans retreat in the fading sun, we return to the silence of autumn. Saudade. The love that remains. The melancholy for our beloved. The end of this seasons beans, and the summer leave a nostalgia in our heart. But somewhere out there in the Andromeda Galaxy, these beans, this garden and this life I share with Dad are yet to even begin. In that I hold the hope that we may all live again.

What I’ve learnt about growing runner beans

1. The slugs are your enemy, but also try not to kill them. I found a stone circle around the base of the runner beans seemed to work this year, and others have had some luck using a more natural repellent such as nematodes but unfortunately they do still lead to an untimely end.

2. Black fly isn’t the end of the world. Spraying with water is the best bet.

3. Check your beans twice a day, they really do grow that quickly.

4. Clear the freezer before the season starts, you’ll need at least a drawer for the bountiful crop.

5. Runner beans get a bad rep. They are summers song, never begrudge them, and always welcome them back in again.

With love, always

Anna xxx

I am writing this essay as part of the 24 essays club (this is number 16) with the wonderful Claire Venus you can read more about the essay club below.

Join our (free) Essay Club?

1. A beautiful song exists by Ólafur Arnalds which encapsulates this feeling perfectly.

2. https://youtube.com/shorts/B3Sjyybijdo?feature=shared A fabulous video from Brian Cox, explaining his answer to this very question.