Some quick housekeeping!

A few weeks ago, I dropped a mention of the metaphor of “Pruning Your Roses,” which I learned form my dear friend Richard Christiansen—I didn’t realize comments haven’t been turned on (fixed!), I got a bunch of emails asking for elaboration. (That newsletter is here: “Something New is Afoot”; latest podcast episode with Richard is here: “Pleasure Principles.”) This is the title of my very favorite essay in Richard’s first book, The Guide to Becoming Alive; his new book, which is an almanac from the garden called Pleasure Principles goes into it as well.

Richard came over a few weeks ago and remarked that we need to have a plant day for re-potting and pruning. Rob and I have a lot of house plants—there are many fantastic nurseries in Los Angeles, not to mention that every time I go to Ace Hardware, I end up with arms full. (It helps that my husband Rob makes really beautiful concrete planters and they’re not going to fill themselves.) My mom is a fantastic and prolific gardener—so much so, that when she gold older and couldn’t keep up with the maintenance, she insisted on selling my childhood home in Montana and moving into town—an easier life, yes, but also, she couldn’t bear to watch her flowerbeds suffer. I never learned how to garden from her—dutifully and carefully weed, yes—but the garden was her canvas, her vision. (To this day, she refuses to take care of even a single houseplant.)

I’m not sure that I have the patience to be an avid gardener—I love planting seeds, specifically ideas and mental concepts—but I don’t always like to hover near them to see if they root and take fruit. On to the next! I’m not the world’s most patient person. And I really, really struggle to cut anything back or save space in potting beds and in my life. I see a tiny slip of soil that gets a fractional bit of light, and my instinct is to shove something else in there, rather than giving everything else more room to grow and expand.

I talked about this a bit on the podcast (“Do You Need to Put Yourself in Order”), but Patrick Conner, an incredible teacher (you can find him on my list of healers) came to see me when I was recovering from my double mastectomy, and we talked a bit about what my virtuously “dumb and slow cancer” might be teaching me. “You are fast and brilliant,” he offered (his words, not mine!), “maybe the invitation now Is to be dumb and slow.” We then went on to talk about A.I. and how it’s enabled everyone to be a word machine, to turn on newsletters over night. “Elise, productivity is no longer a virtue.”

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot in the past few months, and specifically how I can better catch myself before my arms are over-full, and I am backsliding into a completely overfilled garden that I can’t possibly maintain.

In The Guide to Becoming Alive, Richard writes about the art of bonsai:

“In Japan, pruning is a way to cultivate one’s mind. A method of excising what no longer serves us in an effort to find clarity beyond the clutter. In Zen meditation, monks spend more time cleaning than meditating—sweeping dust to detach fro worldly desires, gloom, and distraction. It’s physically impossible to honor one’s inner light when it’s clouded with dirt. The Japanese art of Bonsai is often considered more a test for the gardener than a ritual for the tree. Bonsai teaches restraint, close looking, and the power of careful pruning.”

Richard offers tips for pruning plants as well (helpful), but his much larger point is metaphorical. In a rush for more—more stuff, more output, more, more more—we would all be served well to reconsider where we’re putting our energy and resources, and keeping things constrained so they can bloom back better. We would all be served to nourish what’s most important to us and to our respective callings rather than attempting to be all things to all people. And yes, sometimes you have to kill your darlings, and cut back flowers that are blooming just a little (hard), in the hopes that some curation and space will let them bloom bigger in the future (hard, hard, hard).

This is hard. I am the queen of getting everything I do to kind of work—rarely do I out-and-out fail, which would honestly be better. When it comes to work, and how I support myself, at last count, I had 12 business lines and/or clients across 2026. That’s a packed garden. And of course, I’m thinking about what more I can add in 2027, because not only do I never learn these lessons, but I’m terrified of negative space.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker writes: “What we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum. Look at the joy and eagerness with which workers return from vacation to their compulsive routines. They plunge into their work with equanimity and lightheartedness because it drowns out something more ominous. Men have to be protected from reality.”

I wrote a bit about this in the Sloth chapter of On Our Best Behavior, but over-doing everything is definitely an antidote to anxiety—as we approach the new year, I’m going to learn restraint…maybe by investing in a bonsai and trimming it back. And here’s to being dumb and slow—at least for the rest of the year.