On The Ephemerality of Green Beans and Slam Poetry
a devotional about savoring
Welcome Back to The Wildroot Parables
Thank you for joining us!
It gives me great joy to bring you all another piece for another week! Thank you again for sticking with me through this new (well, old) direction in my presence here, and I hope you’re enjoying these devotionals as much as I am.
Up top, I want to give the brief warning that I’ll be discussing—though not in any detail, and with an overall hopeful message—the untimely death of a beloved poet that happened only just this morning. I know that for some readers discussions of death at all are a no-go, and so I wanted to give a heads-up so you can make the decision for yourself whether it’s something you want to read about today.
If it’s not, there are zero hard feelings! Take care of yourselves, and feel free to leave your prayer requests in the comment section if you like.
Blessings to all!
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And now, on to the devotional…
Excerpt from “The Last Hours”
by Andrea Gibson (8/13/75 - 7/14/25)
I've written so many poems in my life. And every single one of them was just trying to find a better way to say what one soul said to another soul with one word. Isn't it amazing that I came up so short? Isn't it everything that I tried so hard and failed to write a single thing more beautiful than love.
—
I have something within me that I affectionately call “the squirrel gene”. It’s a little voice in my head that always wants to know for certain that if I need something, I’ve got it.
I’m not entirely sure where I got the squirrel gene. With all humility and deep gratitude, I can say that I didn’t grow up afraid of where my next meal was going to come from. Because of this, I think the gene was passed down from somewhere else, probably from the kitchens of my Midwest ancestors who farmed, and piloted boats up and down the Mississippi, and raised a whole mess of kids, and probably spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to get through winter. I’m sure there’s a relative back there raising her ghostly hand and saying, “Oh. Yeah, that’s me. I gave you that.”
They say it skips a generation, right?
One of the many quirks of the squirrel gene has been a somewhat twisted relationship with the garden over the years. I rarely plant anything that isn’t useful (it can be beautiful, too, but that’s secondary) and I prefer to plant enough of something that I can save and preserve it for later, either through canning, drying, or freezing.
Why plant six bean plants when you could plant sixty, right?
And there’s some wisdom in this mentality, obviously. It’s not bad to be prepared, to steward one’s resources well. But there are some unintended emotional consequences when “gardening success” is based solely on growing enough to save for later.
Chief among these consequences is my inability to eat stuff out of the garden—with the sole exception of salad greens—while it’s fresh. Everything must be preserved for later. Everything must be pickled or dehydrated or blanched. And while it feels incredible to survey a packed shelf of twinkling jars after an afternoon of canning…there are flavors I realize that I’m missing out on. Experiences I’m denying myself in favor of some kind of delayed gratification.
Eating in season is a study in ephemerality. You can jar up tomatoes and preserve some of their color and healthfulness, but they’re never going to taste the way they did sun-warm, raw, sliced, salted on a piece of buttered bread on the patio. Green beans are easy to blanch and freeze and will retain some of their vibrancy, but they’re never going to be as sweet as they are fresh off the plant, just slightly underripe and tender, the perfect snack while you’re hosing everything down and daydreaming in the cool of a summer evening.
This morning, while I was in the thick of writing this silly little post about fresh veggies, I heard about the untimely passing of
, a Colorado-based poet whom I first discovered during a heavy slam poetry phase I went through in my early twenties. And the news struck me harder than I expected. Andrea’s was a voice I had grown used to in a certain period of my life, and knowing that the freshness of their voice had been removed from the future gave me a certain type of ache.Like the seasons, slam poetry is another study in ephemerality. The quality of the writing is only part of the point; the rest of its magic lies in the performance. It’s the connection with an audience, the cadence of a unique human voice, the rhythm, the push and pull. It’s unmistakable, and it’s impossible to replace. You can record a performance, and you can write down the poems from a poetry slam and publish them in a book to keep forever—to preserve the words for later—but you do miss out on some of the work’s original incantatory nature when you’re not hearing it in person, from a stage, in the same room. It’s the once-in-a-lifetime feeling of consuming something that will never be replicated.
Andrea was diagnosed with cancer in 2021 and spent the last few years savoring what life they had left. I followed their journey the way we do these days: from a distance, through social media. But as I consider Andrea’s life and career, the squirrel within me is quieted. Andrea wrote books, but their true craft was honed on stage, in the moments marked by uniqueness. There are some things you can store for later. There are some things you simply can’t.
So this year, I’m learning to enjoy what’s fresh. To harvest and eat within the same hour. To let the immediacy fill me with a certain kind of nourishment.
I hope and pray that I’ve grown enough to save, but that’s a concern for later.
For now, in this hot heart of summer, I savor what I can only taste once.
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Yes, this rings a bell...the heart of a mistake we all make and regret. We will press on, fearing being left behind... we'll look at, hear that, taste that experience later when we have time. But we won't, that unique instant will never return...