On Growing

An essay figured as a garden, and the people we plant in it. Growing, here, is treated horticulturally and relationally at once: a life cultivates other lives, and is cultivated by them, and what grows is never fully under the gardener's control. The piece is among the warmest of the On——ing essays, concerned with patience, tending, and the slow returns of care. It reads personal and communal growth as the same act at different scales, and asks what it means to plant something in another person that will outlast the planting — another form of the legible trace at the heart of the whole project.

Among the On——ing essays this is one of the most patient, and it asks to be read slowly, in the register of tending rather than building. Its garden is not only a metaphor for the self but for what we plant in others — the returns of care that arrive long after the planting, in lives that outlast the gardener.

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