A Secant Query

Between Possible and Future

Wherein I learn of deep watering, and don't like it...

Between Possible and Future

Shallow Roots

In my work, I do a lot of watering. But it cost to much for me to water. So most of the watering is automated. So I am mostly tending to water systems. Repairing gaskets, replacing cut line. It's a series of tubes, but it's water.

Some places, I am planting a thing that is away from a water line. So I am to water it every few days. This feels nice. Doing something nice. Imagine how nice it must feel: wake up. Make food. Wash dishes. Do your hair. Boot up. Depart. Now, water this plant. It would like water. You have water. You give it water. Nice.

Time passes in this way. Then, see told there is a change: no more watering the plant. This is called deep watering🍑. Deep watering feels awful. For you. Bit also for the plant! No more watering! The whole dynamic shifts. The heart an empty nest. It hurts. It hurts so much.

I have to show my love for the plant by not doing anything for the plant. Deep watering is letting the roots get as tall as the plant. Because the water isn't on the surface.

Hand-watering is a comforting practice for many gardeners. But it can deliver water faster than soils are able to absorb it, thereby causing wasteful runoff.

Infrequent, deep watering is much better than applying a little bit of water all the time. You want the plant to establish a strong, deep root system to help survive the extremes
Gabrielle LaTora, University of Georgia

Fledging, but it's plants.

Possible, Not Future

I have this conversation. It's about rivers. In it, the waterway some minutes from me is brought up.

Some years back, this is an infested, unhealthy thing. And now the concrete is taken out of it and it is this fun, vibrant thing with all these dimensions to it.

We get on a subject of how people around me had very nasty futures. Futures I have never imagined. Futures where any failure sent jolts of pain from the future into the present, like electroshocks, to correct for the error.

This future would pilot the present, like teleoperating from the end of time📹.

Some Sort of Beast

I am invited I might lean less on repair work with people's future. And focus the subject of time to come on possibilities (to skip the future entirely). I am left every excited. People starving for a relationship with change. I get to feed them what feeds! No more abusive futures; The possibilities!

A new word excites me, more than it might excite another. Words have peferences. Some words play certain parts. Other words play any part - they want to be on stage. Before people. Light. To some words, the wrong spelling is the right light. Like wearing a little outfit, like stripping.

Into a mother tongue whose words reward strongest conversations of control and willful misunderstanding, I am born. In other words, languages reward warmth. In others still, poetry is the preference. Pleasing words got me through a botched childhood.

Words find attention. I find language for what hurts. The relationship's fantastic; fungal partners to grow alongside couldn't have it better.

My Be When Possible

Future, in my language, is a care (a loving-place). Bones to flesh my grief in. And live about as everything the grief's not.

One might get love from a parent. Mine, I get from words. Words raise me. I a child, home in words. A little a thousand tiny "if"s raise.

If one sound can hold this... If this word can find you... If your scribble can home that...

So it suprises me. And it might not surprise me. But it surprises me. Sees my pain a place from me to ground. How jupiter grounds to Io. Into torrents of care work storms colliding with the interstate I grow up beside generate, I am poured.

By a future, I am held. As through freezing nights alone, homeless, teenage. As through nights around neighbors unable to connect, and with me a hunger I still can't get full. Through a final push to leave another lover turned abusive, I am held, like the bike under me. I walk away, and get to the future where I write this wakes, now, in a bed.

Now Impossible Futures

The future is, famously, unequally distributed. Time machines exist: life before and after the word for it. Having the language for what hurts is indistinguishable from staying in conversation with a hurt.

The hurt going the way of the tip of the nose isn't stayed with - it just saturates. It still hurts (the nose it still there). But it can't be seen. Close one eye and it's back.

But who is going to welcome pain with the curiosity they welcome the sight of their nose? Who will close one eye - to see pain, who will say the magic word.

Moving breaths observing pain from 10⁰ to 10², might be a lot of observations to lose to "This breath, I might observe I am in pain." For a baseline, count observations this breath; breath in, and observationmaxx (notice everything you can). You're an observation maximalist - is there anything better in the world?

Observe. Let every sense be its pain. See every sense a pain (the body has never distinguished - kink until observed otherwise - the body's just into attention). What hurts might like a language. Be language living in a body. You outlive the last human. And you birth the first human. A future. Good. Do you welcome🍓 these observations; Does your body love you?

What Loves You

🍑 - https://site.extension.uga.edu/fultonag/2025/05/good-watering-practices-help-keep-tomatoes-healthy/

📹 - Deep Time Walk - a 4.6 km facilitated walk where 1mm equals a thousand years

🍓 - Deep Welcome - Listening To the Noise Until It Makes Sense↩