One of the many things I admire in Christopher Alexander’s conception of patterns, which I have written about here before, is his conviction that the distinction between a good and a bad pattern is simply whether the pattern helps nourish or reduce the life of the system it is part of. A good pattern, he says, strengthens the life and vitality of everything around it; a bad pattern, conversely, will eventually contribute to the decay and eventual destruction of the whole system of which it is a part. This is not a matter of opinion or ideology, but a phenomenological fact. A well-built roof beam will help keep a house standing for centuries, whereas a poor joint will eventually let in the water that leads to the leak that rots the walls; but he also means more than this.

Furthermore, it doesn’t matter how you think things ought to work; a pattern is good or bad simply because it works with or against the forces that are actually in place. For example, many people think that the threat of incarceration ought to reduce crime. But incarceration is, in actual fact, a bad pattern; evidence points overwhelmingly to the fact that incarceration does little as a disincentive, because the reasons people end up in prison have more to do with trauma, desperation, and systemic racism than because they are naughty people who might be scared into goodness by the prospect of going to jail. But incarceration is a much simpler pattern than any of the relational, nuanced, complex, and compassionate alternatives. And it has a grim moral righteousness to it which satisfies our sense that Something Has Been Done, and it is very lucrative for the people engaged in serving it up, and therefore it is very hard to shake off the conviction that it serves its supposed purpose.

Bad patterns, in other words, provide a kind of shortcut which means you don’t have to think about or deal with the actual complexities at work; they seem to work in the short term, and it is much easier to build things based on one’s idea of how things should work, because you don’t actually have to go and find out if things do in fact work that way; you simply have the idea and execute accordingly. You will, of course, end up angry and bewildered by the apparent divergence of reality from your ideology – but you may content yourself with thinking that reality, not your ideology, is flawed.

If, however, what you want to do is build things that actually work, you have to go and find a lot of things out, and the only way to do that is by spending a lot of time and attention and care and making a lot of mistakes and not giving up. Good patterns are difficult because they require trial and error and experiment and iteration; they cannot simply be thought out in advance and then applied willy-nilly, because they are not theoretical but based in the actual nature of reality. I have understood this in a theoretical sense for some years, but currently I am experiencing this in a very visceral way through an attempt to grow a vegetable garden.

it’s bloody hard work to make a garden

So much useful knowledge abounds on the topic of gardening that surely no one should ever, at this point, make any kind of gardening mistake. There are ten thousand helpful hints, TV shows, manuals, blogs and books to ensure that you have the answer to every possible question. And yet, as it turns out, we need all that help because it’s bloody hard work to make a garden, and there are so many things to learn that it is fundamentally impossible to wade through all the information that might – theoretically – make it possible for you to plan it so correctly that you have no trouble. All you can possibly do is wade in, and either learn from your mistakes or give up in a huff.

In my garden, for example, it turns out that the deer eat everything. I fence it off from the deer, but then the squirrels dig it up. I manage to keep the squirrels out, but what I protect from the squirrels the chipmunks find. I seal off an enclosure from the chipmunks, and to my chagrin even the lizards nibble my seedlings. Mosquitoes get into my pond; the wind blows over my greenhouse full of seed starts; late frost blights my peach tree; aphids attack the tomatoes that survived the frost.

It sounds like a litany of disasters, and it is. And yet – in fact the peas and beans and corn and radishes are coming along nicely. Yes, there are fewer of them than I’d imagined, and I’ll have a smaller, later harvest than I hoped; but I know a hundred things I didn’t know before, things to do differently next year, and meanwhile butterflies float over the grass and two tiny fawns hardly larger than jackrabbits bound like spotted shadows after their mama at the edge of the meadow; the chipmunks wash their noses at the edge of my tiny pond, and birds I’ve never seen before come down to drink. Yes, they’re scratched up all my wildflower seeds, but it’s worth it to see them brighten the mornings with their gold-flashed wings. All the strongly-scented herbs like rosemary and sage and thyme and hyssop and mint have been left alone, and hummingbirds skim past to investigate the flowers.

A good garden pattern, in my bit of forest, is one which takes into account the presence of these other inhabitants. It doesn’t matter how I think a garden should be. If what I want is vegetables, I have to accept that the bear and deer and squirrels and lizards and wasps are part of the pattern – challenges to be accepted as part of the reality of being here. I can neither ignore nor wish away nor violently eject these visitors from the patch of earth we share, unless I wish to make it into a very different, much deader place. I can’t have the joy of shy fawns in the dawn light and an unfenced rose garden, just as I can’t have the pleasure of the snowy forest glimmering like Narnia in the starlight without also having the occasional late frost nip my dreams of ripe figs along with the new leaves.

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Today I am thinking about patterns of religious ideology, one which seems to me good, one bad. Today is Saturday, the day I mark as the Sabbath, a day I set aside for being glad the world exists. In Jewish tradition, the Sabbath is a gift from God – not a reward for being good or a grim day of dutiful worship, but a day each week in which to be fully alive, a taste of paradise here and now, so that we remember why we bother living at all. The Sabbath is a day given over to rejoicing in existence and celebrating its sweetnesses, because otherwise we might forget why we’re doing here. I don’t believe in any kind of anthropocentric deity, but I love the tradition of the Sabbath; for me, at least, it is a reminder that the greatest human task is to love the world. It is enshrined in our tradition to stop labor, not only for physical respite but for the active taking of pleasure. We prepare especially delicious food, we adorn ourselves in lovely clothes, we make love, we pray, because the rest of our days are easier and the hardship of the world more bearable when we also set time aside for delight – not as a reward at the end of life, but as a recurring thread throughout our lives. What else is holiness if not the act of honoring the world with our delight in its gifts?

In order to keep the Sabbath, of course, I have to arrange things in a certain way – I have to say no to things on Saturdays, keep careful kinds of boundaries, shut certain kinds of doors. This means missing out on events and pleasures and experiences. But it is worth it, to me, for the sense it gives me of a day untouched by demands or clocks or expectations. It is a very pure kind of freedom. A lot of unlearning and rethinking was involved in carving out this time, and I know very well that many people don’t have the luxury of doing so. But I believe all the more firmly now that time away from toil should be a human right and not a luxury. The Sabbath is a good pattern, life-giving, renewing. The notion that rest and ease are delayed rewards to be earned only by sufficient sweat is a recurring theme throughout the history of oppression; I never forget that Work sets you free is what was written over the gate to Auschwitz.  

For Jews, the day of observance runs not dawn to dawn but dusk to dusk, something that has always given me pleasure. On Fridays we clean the house, and then I make an elaborate dinner and we light candles and often sing, and I wake up the next morning with a bright sensation, rather like knowing someone I love has come home at last.

This morning, however, I woke up without my usual lifted heart. I was thinking about the Supreme Court decision on abortion. And if it had not been the Sabbath, perhaps I would have gone on thinking about it, making myself sick with dread and rage; but I resented very bitterly having my sense of holiness torn from me, and I felt very determined to get it back. After all, it is exactly this sense of the Sabbath – my conviction that the world is not merely struggle and suffering – that this handful of vampiric old men and their glassy-eyed wives really wish to rob us of once and for all. They genuinely and truly desire to make pleasure and ease as inaccessible as possible, because they genuinely and truly think that we do not deserve it.

the hungry men at the feast

I have to draw the conclusion that these men sincerely want our unhappiness because there is no other explanation. It certainly is not about the well-being of babies, any more than their support of police violence is about public safety, for a thousand clear reasons. It is not merely “political,” since they are not elected and enjoy lifetime appointments. It is not simple greed, because they are already rich. It is ideological, and their idea is that people are not supposed to have a nice and easy time of things in the world. Those gray-souled men sincerely believe that hardship and struggle is right and good. Many people believe this. I have my own theories about why, and how this came to be, which I will not go into here; I will simply say that because it is the Sabbath, the day I set aside to love the world, what I thought about was not about protest, or legislation, but rather how to help make a world that is as vividly and lusciously and gloriously in opposition to those beliefs as possible.

There is no argument to have with people who think sex for pleasure is a sin or think that there are any children, anywhere, who deserve to be caged or think that it’s all right to execute someone because you are scared of them. All we can do, as has been done since the founding of this country, is keep building the tender beautiful world underneath the long shadow of the grim one. What the Sabbath tells me is those brittle bleak men are part of the world, but the world, in its abundance, is not part of them; though it contains them, they are cut off from it, like hungry men at a banquet who see only dust and filth upon the table. And while they will try like hell to make us eat filth from their plates, we are here to feast despite them. If they force us to eat sand, we must make up for it in other ways; we must feast and celebrate each other, we must rinse each other’s mouths, we must wash the tables clean and serve up more dainties for each other’s pleasure.

we must pledge to make each other’s lives a little easier

The Sabbath says to me: we cannot prevent those who wish misery upon this world from causing it, but we can rebalance the scales with sweetness. If people have to travel for safe care, we take them in. If people are frightened, we comfort them; if they are imprisoned, we don’t abandon them; if they are murdered, we celebrate their lives and their purpose and care for their children. In a thousand ways we pledge to make each other’s lives a little easier.

This is what we can do that they cannot, for none of them wish ease for anyone. They seem to me like a grasping and jealous patriarch with a long arm, who feels his power waning and his death coming and cannot believe it is possible that after all this he doesn’t get to stay king of the world. The more he sees his children living different lives, brighter and more vivid and more free than his own, the more violently he tries to hold them back, not understanding that by doing so he only makes them long more fiercely to escape him.

Believing that the world is bad and only through grimness and struggle can you wrench out your own redemption is, perhaps, sometimes an easier pattern to follow than trying to live by the (much messier and more complex) idea that the world contains multitudes, both joyful and terrible, of which you are only a tiny and befuddled part trying to do your best. So it is possible that there will always be bitter old men (and the young who inherit their violence and the women cowed into aiding them) who try to drain the world of joy, for any of a hundred reasons, and leave themselves miserable as dried-out toads in the process. But that pattern will always go awry eventually, because you can only control people through misery for so long; you are acting against the actual flow of the world when you try. Joy breaks through, as it always has; tenderness always returns, because it is a good pattern, a life-bringing pattern, a pattern that brings ease to pain instead of the other way around.

This attempt is not new. I have to remind myself that these men have been working to deny life and ease to other people for centuries. In fact, it used to be much easier for them to do so; they are used to doing it, and they are surprised and angry, now, at everything that makes it difficult for them to casually rub our faces in the dust. The world is already diverging from the pattern they have tried to force upon it. The dystopia they desire has already been as close as it will ever be to reality. I find this important, because it is not some imaginary hell-future they are dragging us towards but back into their own nightmares. Their dream – the dream of a world so steeped in misery it cannot get out – has already failed; too many hearts have already escaped their clutches. But they cannot quite allow themselves to believe it, because they live so deeply in their own fantasy they cannot conceive of their own failure; they keep trying to bash the world back into the shape they want.

And yet – no matter how they torture it, it won’t conform. This doesn’t mean that the anguish they are trying to cause is not enormous; it enormous, and it is the entire point. It is what they sincerely think that we deserve, the way they think the world should be. Other people are writing brilliantly about what to do right now and in the immediate future to mitigate that anguish. (Some links at the bottom.) For myself, I am trying to remember that we are not, as it sometimes seems, sliding deeper and deeper towards some point where the anguish takes over and all joy is extinguished. Rather, it seems to me that we are in a moment of convulsion, where a set of old, bad patterns is dying so hard it’s breaking our lives apart with its thrashing. This is not the linear movement towards a better world we were taught we could have if only we worked hard enough, and that is hard to accept; we didn’t know that it would hurt so much. It turns out that good patterns for human life don’t simply emerge and flower like happy little seeds in a windowbox if we just water them enough. They’ve got to survive hailstorms, bulldozers, devastation. They emerge from ashes, like the phoenix, like morels after a forest fire.

What the Sabbath helps me remember is that this time is awful, violent, miserable in a dizzying variety of ways; but it is also not going to just be the way things are forever. So much has already grown up out of the ashes of everything they’ve burned, and that terrifies them. Those frightened, wither-hearted men are trying to convince you that your joy is something they can permanently crush, and you should simply accept misery as your lot; their whole intention is for you to experience the world as awful, for the more wretched they can make us, the longer their gangrenous ideology can keep its rotting grip. In this moment, keep whatever joy you have, and tend it well. Our joy is the crack running through the vast flat tarmac plain that is their pattern for the world, the mushrooms pushing up from under the asphalt, the knotweed smashing through their concrete. More people get free all the time. For every teenager they radicalize, a dozen more are learning new and different and more loving ways of being. We are the gardeners of the world to come.

In my most generous moments, I know deep down that those cruel old men and I are all equally bewildered by existence, its whys and wherefores, how we got here and where we may end up and how on earth to live as fragile humans on the earth. I, too, am frightened. But at least I don’t wake up each day despising everyone around me; I don’t wonder why the world won’t just lie down and behave according to my plan; I don’t have to sit with the acid taste of joylessness in my mouth each morning. I only have to look around, at the nodding grasses, at the beloved friends eating the hard-won tomatoes from the garden, still warm from the summer sun, to know that it is already – still – always – worth being here together.

You may, like me, take solace and inspiration from the writing of adrienne maree brown, who has been a continual and guiding light for me in these times of struggle. And if you are looking for places to go right now or tomorrow (and next week and next month) to support reproductive freedom, both the Guardian and KQED have good, comprehensive, well-sourced lists compiled by thoughtful humans., with different and useful places to put your time and energy.