Existing, persisting, and maybe a loci of control

04 Jun, 2026

"Prune to the outward-facing bud." — Every pruning guide ever written, as if we all agree on which way is out.

I have never been vivacious. I have been persistent, which is a different animal entirely. Something that exists in a room rather than fills it. Furniture that has outlasted several owners and no longer matches anything; certainly comfortable, definitely odd. The world isn't helping with that, for sure, but I think I have a good grasp of my locus of control. The walls of the house. The fence around the garden. The border around the beds. I have control there. I can effect change¹ with my favorite Felco shears or at least affect the illusion of it.

They are an outward manifestation of my locus. Head to hand, hand to shears, shears to tree with a satisfying snipping. The branch falls and I pretend I meant it.

Summer means the orchard is alive. It's nearly insufferably so. Green things climbing over each other. Verve pouring out of every wound made in winter. Despite my best efforts at wielding control, the whole mess persists. It's the great miracle of every season, truly. Regardless of how badly I may have botched the previous year (did I trim the wrong branch, the wrong leader, the right leader?) nature always bounces back. Some years, like this one, it decides to fuck with us by letting random sticks reroot and now we have seven new currant bushes.

Are they the currants we like the most of all the ones we've planted?
Of course not.

Will the birds eat them instead of the ones we prefer?
Of course not. The birds have taste. And allegiances.

It's a level of spirited antagonism I honestly appreciate. It's not spite, exactly. Spite requires awareness of the other. This is something older — the same dumb insistence that makes lichen colonize a headstone. It doesn't know you're there and it'll just keep going. This is a capacity I do not seem to have as much of these days. I get clipped and I do not rebound. I am cast to the ground and I do not reroot. The birds leave me alone, which is worse? Am I not worth eating.

I talked to my wife about it briefly, in the way it has been manifesting as a grumpy, downtrodden mood with little obvious reason for it². So I question what part of me is contributing. And she, who always sees the best in me, reminded me that self-flagellation isn't going to help and that I both am and do deserve good things³.

She's right, of course. She's always right. The problem is that the part of me that believes her and the part of me that believes the dull shears are the same part, and it can't hold both.

I don't have a conclusion. The shears are still dull. I keep trying to sharpen them but I think I've been holding the stone wrong. The edge against flat, flat against edge, some inversion I can't see because my hands are in the way.

The currants, meanwhile, are thriving.

Footnotes

#birb #garden #nature