Courting Radical Inconsistency
And other rules to live by.
Richard (see below) and I will be at Brentwood Country Mart for a conversation and book signing Thursday, November 21 at 6:30pm (tomorrow night!). Come! It’s free, but you can reserve a seat here, which comes with a book.
A few weeks ago, I sat in the audience and watched a Martha Stewart interview, which was funny and sharp, and the final push I needed to watch R.J. Cutler’s documentary Martha on Netflix. It does not disappoint.
While I’ve been well aware of Martha—during my years at Condé Nast, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was on fire, and those magazines were beautiful—I didn’t closely track her takedown, and was shocked to learn in the doc that it came at the hands of James Comey, no less. WTF! (I learned a great related phrase too, which I’m very much going to take on the road: “Bitch hunt.”)
Meanwhile, I absolutely did not realize that Martha was the first woman to achieve billionaire status through her own business efforts. Huge snaps to Martha.
Martha is the subject of one of the interviews in my dear friend Richard Christiansen’s brand-new book, The Guide to Becoming Alive, which is out this week.(You can hear him on Pulling the Thread this episode “Doing Beautiful Things,” we spoke in a Thanksgiving episode called “Cultivating Creativity and Abundance,” and I wrote “A Spirit Date” about how we met.) Richard’s book is structured around lessons from the garden: It’s a braid, which includes the making of the the house and brand (Flamingo Estate), essays from Richard, and interviews with people like Martha, Terry Tempest Williams, Jane Goodall, Jane Fonda, and yours truly. (Our conversation is in the chapter “Court Your Shadow like the Fern.”)
Martha represents the chapter “Work Like Wisteria.” I didn’t know much about wisteria—I have a black thumb, unfortunately, though I do love my house plants and hope that my love and Rob’s fastidious ministering to them enough—but apparently it can survive and thrive in the harshest corners of the garden. It finds a way to grow despite shoddy soil and un-luscious sun—it eventually prevails and crafts an empire. In his essay, Richard writes about the beginning of COVID, when his ad agency Chandelier teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and he felt like his identity was shattering as well.
Here’s Richard in The Guide to Becoming Alive:
Growing a garden is a lesson in attention. You must tend to the idiosyncrasies of each fickle plant, each ornery vine. Citrus love nitrogen, Tomatoes love sun, and Peach trees need tons of phosphorus and potassium. But if I've learned anything from my hours spent in the garden it's that Wisteria sinensis, the mighty Lilac vine, loves a good fight.
The largest blooming plant on Earth is a Wisteria, planted as an afterthought in a bucket a hundred years ago in Sierra Madre, California, not far from Flamingo Estate. Its seeds originally came from China, and a couple planted them in 1894 to celebrate their new house in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley. Each year the plant transforms from a gnarled tangle of thick, twisted brambles into a cascading wall of bright yellow green leaves and purple flowers, its beauty contingent on how hard a winter it endured.
In folklore, the Wisteria's botanical fortitude symbolizes growth, prosperity, and victory over hardship. “The worse you are to them, the more they enjoy it,” my mother said when she and I planted the Wisteria at Flamingo Estate. "Treat them mean, keep them keen," she said with a smile. Probably the hardest-working plants in the whole garden, the Wisteria have now completely overtaken the walls and roof of our apothecary, the Goat Shed, in its determined conquest to expand. The Goat Shed sits on bedrock, and almost nothing survives there. But the Wisteria thrives. Its intricate root system digs deep and spreads wide, exploring every nook and cranny of the soil in an unyielding search for sustenance.
Finding nutrients isn't easy, but it's what gives the Wisteria strength, what makes it grow. The Wisteria's ability to thrive in harsh conditions is a lesson in resilience. … The very essence of the plant's success lies in its tireless drive to climb, with twining tendrils that creep up rapidly in pursuit of sunlight, encircling the walls and support beams with a selfish determination and strength (they've taken down many-a-gutter and roof line). By spinning and curling toward the sun, and wriggling up in alternating directions, they show us the power of flexibility.
The corresponding conversation with Martha is funny and wise—I loved the following exchange.
RICHARD: And then there's a chapter on work called "Work like Wisteria," because...
MARTHA:..because you just can't beat it down! It fills every nook and cranny, right?
RICHARD: Exactly.
MARTHA: You can try to kill it, and it just keeps going!
RICHARD: So I thought... Who do I know who's like Wisteria?
MARTHA: [Laughs loudly.]
RICHARD: And that's you, of course. Little Miss Wisteria.
MARTHA: But here's the thing with Wisteria. Have I told you what my father told me?
RICHARD: No.
MARTHA: He grew these two beautiful Wisteria trees and then one year, one of the two trees didn't bloom. And he told me to hit it with a hammer.
RICHARD: What?
MARTHA: Yes! Hit it with a hammer all along the branches! And the next year it will bloom brilliantly. So, of course, I hit it with a hammer. And it never bloomed more beautifully than the next year!
RICHARD: Wow.
MARTHA: And then guess what happened? It died!!! [Both laugh.]
RICHARD: So what's the moral there? To bloom wonderfully and die, or stay flowerless?
MARTHA: Not to bloom. It's okay not to bloom for a while. Because that's what happens in business. That's what happens in life. Not every year is as productive as you want it to be. And that's okay.
Every chapter is as lovely as the next, loaded with wisdom and some really great lines. For example, one of Richard’s biggest drive is to reconnect us all to the garden—and its seasons. One of the things he writes and talks about a lot is cultivating “Radical Inconsistency,” or pushing us all to accept that things must and should change—that food carries the provenance and taste of its place, but everything else we use and consume should as well. That anything less is inert, dead, absent the markings of place. To that end, the candles and soaps he makes, shift from batch to batch too, which is not exactly the norm in an industry reliant on chemistry. But I love it. (And the bar soaps, too.) It’s a beautiful rule to live by: Here’s to courting radical inconsistency, or at least getting more comfortable with it.
See you next week!
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
11/14: On doing beautiful things with Richard Christiansen
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
11/7: Working with our darkest energy with Thomas Hübl, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
10/31: Working with your enemies with Sharon McMahon
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
10/24: Staying rooted in what you want with ME
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
10/24: On the women who raised consciousness with Clara Bingham
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
10/17: On the birth of the allomother with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
10/10: On thinking impossible with Jeffrey Kripal, PhD
Apple | Spotify | Transcript
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Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
As a long-time lover of the show Desperate Housewives (which is set on Wisteria Lane), I am absolutely delighted to learn what makes wisteria so special. And I loved how Martha immediately, immediately knew what he was getting at when he brought them up.
I have 4 Peggy Martin rose vines surrounding my house (and always trying to find more spots to drop them). Peggy Martin roses are a hybrid rose that were found in the yard of their namesake whose New Orleans rose garden was underwater for weeks following hurricane Katrina. The other varietals merged together to make a plant that could survive, even though they all individually died out. They are hardy as hell, evergreen, and bloom the most stunning tight bright pink roses. They have a few thorns, but not too many that you can't work with them with a mindful bare hand. The closest my husband and I have gotten to divorce was when he trimmed her wild branches back (but fret not, she grew back stronger.) Plants are magic.