Before it all goes underground

by Dana Perry

Even AI-generated drivel will admit that the veil between the living world and the underworld is at its thinnest in the autumn. A mishmash of the wiki-edited history of Samhain, social media posts with cozy fall sweaters and pumpkin spice captions (+ ghost emoji), and sprinkled with Reddit’s r/Psychic-infused details, it spits back out at us all of the things it has been fed, complete with bullet points. And it does it all for the diminutive cost of 12 ounces of rapidly-disappearing potable water and a slice of human integrity. 

Flesh and blood humans have embodied this in various ways our whole lives: the spookiness and gore of halloween, the glowing carved-face pumpkins, the ghosts cut from sheets and shadows. In this time when the wind shifts to cold, we bring in our final winter crops for storage and we prepare for the darkness of winter. Green leaves shift to glorious yellows, oranges, and even browns and drop to the ground. We often perceive leaf drop as some sort of death as well, but in honoring that the cycle of life is really that — a never ending cycle — it is, in essence, just energy transfer. As trees prepare for the winter, they shift most of their energy underground into the root system. With any luck the leaves will remain uncleared, providing important habitat space for beneficial insects to stay cozy over the winter; slowly decaying, restoring the soil with vital nutrients for the new batch of plants, fungi, insects, and animals (humans included) to uptake the following year. 

We humans have a penchant for disrupting the cycle.

Humans are biologically reliant upon plants to survive. Plants are autotrophs, and through photosynthesis create their own food. Lucky for us, they produce all of our food too (as heterotrophs, we can’t really do it ourselves). Short of the few things we can make or modify in a lab (which we shouldn’t be eating anyway) the original source of everything we put in our mouths for sustenance comes from a plant; even cows eat grass and grain to give us dairy and meat. If plants cease to survive, so will we. But the opposite is not true. Humans dying off would be a boon to the natural world; it could grow wild again, without constraint, spared from being ripped up by the roots and replaced with concrete.

On stoops and in windows we display adulterated forms of these symbols of harvest and decay. Plastic bones and plastic pumpkins and plastic ghosts — the rest of the year stored in plastic boxes in plastic-lined garages. Unlike leaves, which eventually will actually become soil once again, these things will never disappear. Even when we throw them away, they get wrapped in layer upon layer of plastic only to pile on top of other people’s plastic shit. Never truly decomposing and converting into something new, but instead just ever-so-slowly breaking into smaller and smaller bits: moving into the ocean, to the dust, and to our bloodstream, our placentas, our brains.

In Prospect Park, plastic wrappers sit undisturbed in tree beds like confetti. On my dining room table sits a packet shellac-coated candy of questionable flavor in the shape of autumn leaves. I wonder to myself what might decay first: this autumn-leaf candy left alone to its own devices, or my daughter’s tooth filled to the brim with it. The good news for her is that she’s only five, so that tooth will fall out, eventually anyway. But mine have got to last me for at least another 30, hopefully 40 years. Or at least until the AI takeover.  

As the film between the living and dead begins to thin this year, I’m especially drawn to roses (Rosa spp.). Not the human-manipulated powder pink bridal bouquet-style at the floral market, but instead the last few petals of magenta desperately clinging to a long-forgotten leggy and heavily prickled bush. Maybe the type of rose that accompanies a skull and crossbones. Rose holds space for all of this; for the never-ending circle of round and round, for both life and death, for this world and the other one. Hoping to transmute our grief to hope, we throw roses on the caskets of our beloved. They hold remarkable beauty when fresh and somehow almost as much beauty when dried, their drooping heads propping up the edges of the shroud. 

---

A proud alum of the school, Dana Perry is also a teaching mentor and the blog manager at ArborVitae. She sees clients and writes in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her website here.