Trusting your instincts

Or, failing that, your senses.

There’s a scene in the new season of Star Trek Picard where our titular Jean-Luc, played by an 81-years-young Patrick Stewart, bless him, has to give a pep talk to a young woman on the eve of a historic undertaking. If nothing else, Paramount knows what we’re here for.

“Sometimes,” the woman says, “fear is a friendly reminder that you’re not ready for something.” “No!” Picard gasps. “Fear is fear. It doesn’t speak in riddles. Fear means you’re smart. You understand the risks.”

It’s embarrassing to admit outside deep Trek circles, but Jean-Luc Picard has always been a surrogate space dad to me, in part because he reminds me of my actual dad. Picard is curious and compassionate. He’s cavalier when he knows he’s right and wise enough to admit when he’s wrong. The first episode of The Next Generation aired a year before I was born. Picard has always been there. In a way, I’ve felt like he’s been watching me all these years I’ve been watching him.

Last week’s discombobulation has given way to this week’s FUBAR. Picard’s words couldn’t have come at a better time.

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On that note, I want to take a minute to Talk About It. Abortion advocates have seen the end of Roe coming for years. We’ve been warned, again and again, but now party leaders get to play shocked and senators get to share serious concerns, and if you haven’t realized that this debt-collection agency with a private army that we call democracy may not be equipped to rise to the problems of the 21st century, I don’t know what else to show you.

The good news is that people have been preparing. In swaths of the country where abortion has always been de facto banned, that work has saved lives, and there’s a lot more of it to do. My friend Nicole has made a wonderful guide to abortion resources, reading, and organizations that need your support. I’ve just set up a monthly $50 donation to the Kentucky Health Justice Network, an abortion fund and trans health advocacy group serving 4.5 million people in Kentucky, and who have all of two abortion clinics between them. I encourage you to join me. I can’t imagine a worse form of torture than being forced to carry an unwanted fetus to term against one’s will, at risk to one’s own health. The barbarism of forced birth must end forever.

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I’ve been dreading the repot of my spruce tree for months. You can see it on the right in the photo above, its twin trunks wired down with fuzzy green needles. It’s the tree I’ve had for longest—that’s survived, anyway, there are many fallen soldiers. When I last worked on the spruce in July, rewiring its branches felt like a high-wire act. Now the tree needed to be removed from the dense, mucky nursery soil it had been living in to a smaller pot with airy inorganic bonsai soil.

I didn’t know what to expect beneath the soil line. This tree has seen a lot of abuse, and spruces in particular want a much more free-draining soil than this one has been living in. To make the job more stressful, conifers like spruce depend on fungi living in the soil to survive. The tree feeds the fungus sugar and the fungus returns the favor with nutrients like phosphorous that are essential to the tree’s survival. So I couldn’t just pull the roots out bare and toss the old soil; I had to incorporate enough of it into the new soil mix to inoculate it with the fungus it needs. The last time I tried this, with a pine, the tree died.

When new needles started to emerge, I knew the spruce had woken from dormancy and I couldn’t put off the repot any longer. So of course that’s exactly what I did. I removed the tree from its restaurant planter and brought it home, then let it sit in my bedroom for a week near my subtropical trees under a grow light. Every morning I woke up, saw the tree, and announced to no one that today was the day. By the afternoon I always chickened out.

Look, there’s a lot going on, alright? But the truth is that I was procrastinating because I didn’t trust myself to do a good job on the tree. Which obviously meant I’d screw up, kill the tree, and ruin my bonsai practice forever. Each day I waited, the new needles grew longer and longer, increasing my probability of failure. The spruce was expending all its precious vigor and I was missing the boat.

I’m not good at trusting my instincts. Historically, I tend to do the opposite. I overanalyze and fret about possibilities that deep down I know will almost certainly never occur.

The work to overcome this tendency has been fulfilling. Long story short, my therapists said I had to if I wanted to feel less anxious and depressed, so I tried. I paid more attention to what it really felt like to be anxious—the contours of it, the physical way it inhabited my body. The better I understood how it worked within me, the better I could untangle my fears of the unknown from what I did know about myself and the world. Eventually I realized that my problem wasn’t trusting my instincts. It’s that my instincts had an unwanted passenger riding along and raising hell.

Fear means you understand the risks. I don’t think I could have processed that message five years ago. I’m only beginning to appreciate it now.

I wouldn’t say I’m much better at trusting my instincts than I used to be. I am, however, more inclined to trust the world—or more accurately, my view of it and what I’ve learned about how it works. I may not always trust myself, but I can trust a tree to act like a tree.

The repot went fine. Eventually my agita about missing my shot overcame my fear of screwing up, and I got to work. The roots were in much better condition than I expected. Only a few had rotted, and weighty soil aside, I had lots of fine feeder roots close to the trunk to work with. Mixing the old soil with the new was mainly guesswork, but hey, I trusted my instincts and went with what felt right. This tree’s put up with a lot. I can trust it to put up with more.

While unearthing the tree from its nursery soil, I discovered this interesting root growth about an inch from the nebari. This is the nub of a long circling root I cut when I first got the tree in 2020, and once I saw it, an idea clicked. I think this new planting angle is the best for the spruce yet. Later this season, once the tree recovers, I’m going to shorten one of the trunks and realign the branches to create a less symmetrical, more naturally tree-y design.

Or the tree will die. But it probably won’t, and if it does I’ll learn something from that too. Fear doesn’t speak in riddles. Thank you for that, Patrick.

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Tree reading

MIT engineers use tree junctions to replace load-bearing steel joints. Add to the pile of ancient knowledge that scientists have now decided is worth studying. [Dezeen]

A native hawthorn not seen since the 1930s grows again! [Tiktok]