by Ayesha Siddiqui

There is now a bird feeder outside of my kitchen window. Every morning I refill it with spicy birdseed. This was supposed to prevent the squirrels from eating it, but in fact, they sit on a branch just below the feeder and eat like they’re at a picnic table  (I should have known Los Angeles squirrels would be just fine with spicy food, but I digress). It’s been a joyful moment each day to watch the birds appear in the feeder. Most of the birds share the space and food, though the lone scrub jay who comes by once a day prefers a solo dining experience. There is one type of bird who visits that always captures my attention.

I have always loved spotting the lesser goldfinch on walks around my neighborhood. This tiny little resident pompom of a bird has a nearly fluorescent yellow belly, and the males wear a little black cap of feathers. They are always a welcome sight on an overcast day in the winter, a reminder of color in the life that sits dormant around us awaiting spring. 

Within a week of setting up the feeder, I spotted the first lesser goldfinch. Then another. Now there are six at a time who visit, emptying the feeder so often that I wonder if they’ve taken up permanent residence there. The first time I sat outside near the feeder they chirped at each other, at me, but didn’t venture closer. The second time they hopped along the branches, observing the distance. The third time, they came straight to the feeder, and I was able to watch them up close as they ate. The other birds remain somewhere nearby, hopping from branch to branch, quietly waiting for me to leave. But the brave little lesser goldfinch does not fear me. 

“Perhaps they just aren’t smart enough to fear you,” a recent visitor said. I disagree. Perhaps instead it is that when you’re so small, you have no choice but to be brave, over and over in the world around you.

I won’t say much about the world around us beyond this: the way life operates now is a nonstop churning of opinions, thoughts, news, cycle after cycle of emotional overload that almost feels like it is purposely meant to break and distract. The path of survival I walk is one where I observe the birds outside my window. The choice I will make when I feel small will be that of the brave lesser goldfinch. Over and over. Nature is where I put my attention. It always has the lesson.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

Life has been full lately. “Full” means busy, but being a California transplant from the Northeast, I despise the word busy, so I say full instead. It is full to the seams, bursting even. It can be frustrating, the finite container of a day filled. Despite pressing on every seam you cannot find a space where there is any give. As someone who deeply loves space, the big California blue sky, finding a deeper inhale, being the first one awake with an infinite day stretching before you, this is not my natural habitat, full. My natural habitat is space.

I went out one morning recently. I noticed the warm and sunny January air, the sky, the cars driving by. The soft music playing at the coffee shop, the scrape of the chair, the green of my matcha latte, the way green things find a way to sprout anywhere in Los Angeles, even amongst concrete. I noticed the people and the dogs accompanying them and the sun on their soft faces. After weeks of life being filled to the brim, I was delighted to find so much space in an ordinary moment.

Space can exist in fullness, I am learning. If you have only five minutes to find space, you will find it. For those of us who create, what a remembering.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

In the outdoor wildflower garden are what I call ghost flowers. They are mercurial, sprouting overnight, with translucent stems and ugly leaves, like lithe mushrooms in a bad wig. The first time I saw them I was sure they were mushrooms, wondering how they could have sprouted in such a sunny space. And then as quickly as they appeared, they disappeared again, transforming into green stems, folding or shedding their spotted sheer leaves, moving on only hours after they arrived.

My writing is often through a nature focused lens. It makes it sound like I know what I’m doing. That I know how to care for a garden, that on a walk I might casually point out the names of specific plants and trees. That is not actually the case. My cat eats all indoor plants with great enthusiasm so I’ve given up on those. The small outdoor wildflower garden that is “mine” is not tended by me. 

One can be on a close journey with a part of the world without ever needing to be an expert. I’m never going to go inside and google the ghost flowers. There is a part of me that likes walking in mystery with the surrounding world, using my powers of observation not to identify, but to respond.

Sometimes when I feel withered by life, like I have not been watered or sunned, envious of the blooms in a tiny terracotta wildflower garden, it’s because I’ve forgotten to use those powers. The senses that look and listen. To arrive in the world each day with nothing preformed, predetermined, and only an empty sense of readiness. 

When you look at the ghost flowers this way, they are tall, cursed goddesses in torn robes, returning every fortnight only in July to sway below the grapevines and night jasmine, turned back to green stalks by late morning. They are the reason for summer insomnia and restlessness, singing humans awake with songs not heard by ears. When you look at the ghost flowers this way, they are worth so much more than a name.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

When you propagate a cactus, you twist a piece off. You allow the cut end to callus over. How long depends on the size of the cactus. It could be two weeks. It could be eight weeks. It’s as long as it takes for the cactus to form a callus over the place where it was once rooted to something else. Only then is it ready to be replanted as its own.

When something you were working on withers to the ground, either from never being finished, or just being bad (I often make things that are both at the same time), you could just let it gather dust and decompose. You could also go find the one line of dialogue that captured why you wanted to create in the first place, and twist the piece off. You do nothing with it next. Allow the end to callus over. Allow what once carried you away to end where this now begins. It must learn to not be rooted to anything but itself.

There is work I am planning to revisit. The kind where so many rewrites and reworking of the plot just never produced what I set out to do. I will line up all the twisted off pieces under the sun and allow the cut ends to callus over. Eventually, once replanted, one might even find new roots.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

January
We take a walk in the Medina
Once mighty
Now a bed of exposed stone
Her sun bleached backbone
Snaking the path ahead
Does she dream anymore
Her stripped banks rise twenty feet
A songbird startles in a rare puddle
The trees, pebbles quiet
Too tired for even a sad song.
by Ayesha Siddiqui

January, in the Northern Hemisphere, is a time that no one escapes. Despite sunshine or snowfall, we all are contained within the glumness of short days, the weight of having to take down our holiday decorations, with no merriment in sight for months. It’s a time of perhaps too much contemplation, wondering if no rain yet this season means weeks of cloud cover and storms, if the land we walk on will remain recognizable even a decade from now.

All around us it feels empty. Branches, bushes, banks of rivers, it is all without. Perhaps this is why humans created time this way. Emptiness is the beginning. What else could it be? That is what January provides.

Resolutions and any sort of push towards accomplishment feel antithetical to what the season asks from us. Writers absorb the world around them. The jade bush outside your door is not flowering, yet you expect yourself to somehow have a thousand blooms overnight.

For those getting ready to start another year again on the page, here is an offering:

1) There will be emptiness
2) Then contemplation
3) Then words
4) Then the beginning of something, again.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

I speak often and often only of whatever is growing around me. How else are we to ground ourselves in life if not by the state of what lives near us too. In California especially, you must look more closely at the subtle changes happening around you, or you might miss the gentle shift of seasons that are taking place. 

As we paint the canvas of our year, the boldest streaks of paint are of course, the unforgettable days when the outdoors dominated. The heat wave that caused rolling blackouts. The endless weeks of rain. The immense relief when the change so visibly came: the sun, the break in heat, the drop back to clear warmth, the kind that blurs the days together.

But I don’t want to miss what’s in between the moments that draw your eye first: the bougainvillea are blooming yet again. The grapes that crawl along the fence are beginning to turn from green to purple. New birds have moved into the neighborhood, there are new songs in the morning. Our foliage might be non-existent, but surely you can see that the sunset has turned from honey to amber now.

Our writing is like this too. As we begin to near the final stretch of the year, remember to ground yourself not only in the boldest marks you’ve made, but in the moments in between too. It is not about just what has been finished, but the pages started and abandoned, the thoughts you wrote down on a piece of paper and subsequently lost, and perhaps most of all: what changed in you this year, subtly, a small seed planted that you aren’t even aware will bloom your next work, maybe next year, maybe ten years from now. Take stock of your harvest. Even if there is not much visibly on the table today, that says nothing about the hard work taking place inside you.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

You are traveling to a place you have not been for a long time, but think of often. The anticipation of memory is shimmering within you, cascading like starlight down your arms, then back up again to your mouth where you can’t help but smile. You arrive. The sidewalks have new cracks, the tree is smaller. Or is it larger? Is it the same tree – it must be. There is no way it can’t be, you haven’t been gone that long. But how long, exactly, does it take a tree to change? Surely it must take a great deal of time. No, it’s the same, you’re sure of it. This is the same place. But it’s different. You’re different. This is not how you left.

Sometimes, writing feels this way.

The pages and pages of fiction I’ve written stare back at me – “always strong dialogue” my favorite writing teacher would say. Strong dialogue, a playwright’s bread and butter. Some days I don’t really recognize the theater anymore. What compels a playwright to decide to ask a question in her plays? To write so many words, all at once.

It never stops being strange, to go through the draft of something, or onto the next ten pages trying to figure out where you left off. Half the time I don’t know what happened in the pages I wrote yesterday. I know there is a plot because I know my craft is at a point where it is somewhat automatic. It still remains jarring. What did my characters even do a twenty pages ago? I guess I’ll have to go back and read. Sometimes even twenty pages ago isn’t something I recognize.

We love to talk about discipline in writing. Consistency, habits, routine, can you write fifty-thousand words in one month? It feels like a cage to even write that sentence. What I wish we talked about more is the shedding of skin, learning to deal with our own inevitable evolution. If a format isn’t working for you anymore, stop. Powering through is exhausting. Perhaps sometimes we need to change the medium, not our work. Do not be afraid to change containers when one will no longer fit. Poems, prose, fiction, or plays, it’s all fair game. You’ll ask playwright questions without even meaning to. It’s just what we do.

It’s the same tree, after all. It’s just how you see it now.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

Outdoors where I live there is an overgrown orange tree. The tree has likely not been pruned in many years, judging by the amount of growth on the branches, the offshoots like spiderwebs, crisscrossed limbs holding an overabundance of oranges that fall to the earth too soon or too late, the fruit collected never ready.

Once I volunteered to prune trees in a garden. An arborist led us through determining what to remove, finding the nodes, and the angle to cut away anything no longer serving the tree. We removed competing branches and sliced back anything beyond the most promising nodes. Whenever we’d ask if the tree had been trimmed back enough, the arborist would tell us to cut even more, to keep going, that it was good for the tree.

I could compare editing to pruning. I suppose that’s the most logical connection. But when I think of pruning it is not the words themselves, it is the very essence of what makes you write.

On a tree, nodes are the quiet and often hidden places where so much life begins. Offshoots form, leaves grow, flowers bloom. Nodes contain wisdom to help the tree heal and maintain its structure.

Our relationship to writing grows and evolves differently with each season in life. Perhaps we write for relief, then for understanding, then for exploring, or sentiment, or at times the reason is just a giant question mark. Sometimes others tell us why we write. It gets so muddled after a while, the tangled branches becoming so thick we can no longer reach our own nodes.

When the path forward is too overgrown to see, walk back along your own branches, back towards the first nodes of promise that made you do this to begin with: the story you wanted to tell, the thing you’ll probably never stop writing about, when a stranger told you something kind about your work and they meant it. Prune yourself until it feels simple again.

This is your art, and it is correct.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

Lately I’ve been steeping in the details of setting. The shocking cold of a marble floor even in the height of summer, the joy of lightning bugs on their first flight of the season as the sticky humidity holds you up and the sun departs, the sound of a call to prayer, the song of cicadas in the morning dew. Give me the plays and the fiction where the setting is alive. Characters find themselves being pulled along in ways they don’t even realize by mother nature or guided by the house they’re in. Give me tiny apartments and big sprawling spans of memories. Give me snowstorms and shaking your boots out when you finally get inside, trying to solve your own existence in a room with a leaking roof, marshes and office break rooms. Setting is so alive, buzzing before a character ever enters the room and sets the plot in motion. As my own writing has shifted more towards the world of sci-fi and occasionally the absurd, the idea of creating settings that can quickly transport the reader to the world we’re now inhabiting with little information matters a great deal. Do my characters know where they are? Do I (let’s be honest…sometimes I don’t)?

For a long time I lamented the fact that I only seemed to have a default setting in my writing: mother nature. But this is what tugs at me in my core: the earth, the ground, the water. Sometimes nature  is lashing out with storms, or sometimes she is peaceful outdoors, or sometimes I am imagining her far into the future in a world where everything has become unbearably hot. 

Setting is one of those beautiful things in writing that lingers somehow both close and far outside ourselves. It is not an idea, or evocative of how we want to make an audience feel, it is something that looms larger than what we can truly understand. It shapes humans who grow up in it. It makes others feel like they’ll never belong. It brings out our worst (have you ever spent a summer in the Southeast without air conditioning?) and our best (have you ever watched your neighbor shovel the driveway of the elderly person next door for an entire winter?) We are so small in the grand existence of things. So much of conflict in storytelling comes from humans trying to create some sort of control over their lives in spite of the setting they’re in. And I guess that’s the great illusion: to think we have some control. So when the setting promptly arrives, whispering to you of the surroundings and the temperature on your skin, just know, it was probably around long before you were.