In Honor of Audacity
A meditation on compost, collapse, and the courage to continue
au·dac·i·ty
/ôˈdasədē/ noun
1. a willingness to take bold risks.
2. rude or disrespectful behavior; impudence.
au·da·cious
/ôˈdāSHəs/ adjective
1. showing a surprising boldness.
2. showing an impudent lack of respect.
The word comes from Latin audax — literally, “the one who dares.” Originally, it carried a largely positive connotation: someone brave enough to act, to take a bold risk. Daring. Resolute. Spirited.
But by the 1530s, English speakers had begun to infuse it with suspicion, layering in a second edge: presumptuous impudence. Contempt for restraint. A double-edged impulse — sacred and subversive.
This fusion — technically an interpretive overlay within English — added disapproval to an otherwise valorous expression, producing a word that walks the faultline between courage and collapse. Gall and grace.
When we Anglophones invoke “audacity” now, we wonder:
Is it bravery or arrogance?
Noble risk or reckless nerve?
Lots of things can be audacious — people, poetry, plants — but sometimes, life itself is the most audacious of all.
Over the last couple weeks, after years of prevarication, I launched this Substack and offered up my first long-form essay on the altar of the interwebs — a project I’d carried in silence for months, unsure if I’d ever have the nerve. Mother of Dragons climbed into the digital ether; and even if not everyone knew what to do with a two-thousand-word meditation featuring a metaphorically-fire-breathing yam, I felt — just for a breath — proud. Aligned. Like I had taken my first strides down a warm new path: half-wild, but still sunlit. A path with moss at its edges, brambles at its heels, mud encroaching, and all the more purposeful for it. One requiring momentum and pacing and consideration and the kind of contouring that only my voice could provide.
Then the ensuing week imploded. Sinkholes cratered beneath my feet, fast and merciless.
Audacity.
Did the path forget to tell me we were detouring through Florida?
It was a steady barrage; people I love in various states of distress, my own energy unraveling by the hour. Curveball after curveball. It’s selfish, perhaps, but at least honest: I thought I’d have more than two and a half weeks back from New Zealand before getting thrown off course. Before the vividness of that chapter abroad started melting away like Bay Area fog under the midday sun — leaving me gasping like a fish in an oil spill, blinking, reeling, grasping at an evaporating sparkle.
I could feel my hard-won clarity dissolving, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
Words will be all the more important now.
Even worse, though, was the slide. My grip on my nascent writing routine loosened as energy bled out elsewhere. The seductive ease of self-neglect leered at me, blinking slowly, like an eyeball in a horror film, like the flies crawling across humanoid AIs in Westworld. Old habits resurfaced, whispering their invitations: doomscrolling, numbing, chasing dopamine instead of direction. I could feel it happening — that axis tilt into consumption over creation. The echo — the gravitational pull — of that restless, wordless burnout state that used to hold me hostage.
The one I’d fled.
The one I crossed oceans to outgrow.
You know what would be audacious?
To go all the way around the world. To expunge those parasites.
To declare oneself a creator, not just a consumer — and (since this word is front and center today) to have the audacity not just to make something, but to offer it up.
To ask others to see it as worthy.
Only to come home and, at the first curveball — damn it, cannonball — swallow them right back down.
So yes — as the cannonballs flew last week and Mother of Dragons circled overhead, I flirted with self-abandonment. With letting the whole thing slide. I started to spiral — just a tad.
I was frayed. Barely upright. Leaning towards the siren song of disassociation. Equal parts numb and overclocked.
Luckily, the plants had other ideas.
I didn’t intend to feature the garden in another piece so soon. But once again, it was the garden that helped steady me. Life hurled its audacity, and the garden hurled some right back.
Gardens and shame are anathema. To them, any movement — even what we might call “backsliding” — still counts as growth. Plants don’t wrestle with worth. They just do what they’re created to do: make another bold attempt at life, again and again, as many times as they are able, until they flourish or die trying.
They stretch toward light when they can, collapse when they must, sprout sideways shoots, drop leaves like ballast — and none of it is shameful.
It’s all just part of growing.
And last week, as I floundered, mine did exactly that — wildly, improbably, beautifully. Five audacious little renaissances that tumbled into my exhausted lap, demanding to be witnessed.
1. The Gourdspawn
My compost bin has become a spawning ground. Every day last week, I found new clusters of bright green, twin-leafed babies poking up from between onions and eggshells — little cotyledons looking for all the world like perked ears.
I have a hunch they’re the unruly offspring of a half-rotted gourd I tossed at the end of May; clearly, they refuse to be composted. I keep plucking them out, rinsing them off, and tucking them into a jar of water like it’s not a (very literally growing) problem. But the true leaves are coming now — suspiciously squash-like and full of ambition. I may have accidentally raised a gourd army.
At this point, it’s either give them soil or surrender entirely.
2. The Bok Box
I didn’t expect to be midwifing bok choy from a pizza box, but here we are.
Nor did I expect the compost bin to be so troublesome.
At least eight stumpy little bok choy ends, chopped and consigned to the compost pile after dinner prep, suddenly decided they weren’t done. I started finding them upright and sprouting — defiant — like little vegetal phoenixes rising from onion skins and cucumber peels.
So I fished them out. Sprinkled an inch of soil into a repurposed clear pizza box, misted generously, and nestled them in like newborns in a NICU. I tell myself the goal is to grow a few more edible leaves; really, I just can’t bear to deny them this unlikely second act.
Now the Bok Box lives in a southern window next to a hoya. It steams up daily like a dumpling basket. And inside, the nubs keep going, leaves fanning wider every day.
It's absolutely unhinged. It's also thriving.
Audacity, boxed. And bokked.
3. Green Spear in the Rubble
Ironically, the only aroid in my collection that survived my eight-month absence was the largest one: my two-foot tall Alocasia longiloba. She had very proudly and very exactly two leaves when I left, and the same two when I got back: a more than respectable dormancy.
I returned, offered water — and within days, one of them curled up and died in protest. What? Eight months of endurance, just to self-destruct in my presence? Only an alocasia could manage that level of spite. I figured we were on our way to a less-than-graceful exit.
But then, in the middle of the week’s emotional landslide, I spotted something absurd: a tiny green spear breaking through the soil. A brand-new sprout.
I stared at it like it had insulted me. The audacity. As if she hadn’t just staged a fainting spell for attention. Take note, aroids: y’all have no business playing games with death and rebirth like that.
Naturally, I misted the little shoot and domed it like a doting parent. We ride at dawn.
I figured she’d probably faint again by lunch.
Instead, a few days ago, she sent up another little green spear.
Shameless.
4. The Cursed Cactus
It came to me swinging. Literally. A wildly overgrown, chronically leggy Christmas cactus (I think), its flattened arms flailing like it had opinions. A friend redoing their yard seemed to think I was this cactus’ last and best hope. I didn’t want it. I nearly left it behind on my way to the next crisis-management session of the week. But its gangly, pendulous limbs seemed to say, “You wouldn’t dare.”
So now it lives here.
I’ve done the absolute minimum: straightened it up in fresh soil, mumbled something about drainage, and tucked it in a corner of the balcony like a cursed artifact. I’m not even sure it wants to live. I’m not even sure I want it to live.
But I couldn’t quite throw out something still alive — not that week.
So I gave it a stake. Some soil. Some shade. A reluctant nod toward survival. That’s all I had to give at the time.
We’ll see what it does with that.
5. Thumbelina in a Puddle
She’s no bigger than my thumbnail — a single, vibrant geranium sprig with leaves like tiny tutus that I pulled from the ivy on a whim. If a geranium could kick, she would’ve been kicking and screaming.
Even so, she was still miniscule. I dropped her in a shallow dish of water in the greenhouse, mostly as a formality, assuming she’d wilt by morning.
But she didn’t.
She just sat there quietly in her own personal, humidified puddle for over two weeks, fuzzy and faintly fragrant, biding her time.
Then yesterday, while cleaning out the greenhouse, I noticed something: a single, hair-thin root, long and deliberate, reaching through the water like it had somewhere to be.
That geranium hadn’t just hung on — she’d rallied. Made a move. Proved herself plucky.
Tiny as she is, she’s officially rooting now.
The audacity.
I see it. I get it. And I respect the hell out of it.
I don’t romanticize growth.
Growth is often brutal, uneven, unglamorous. Sometimes it looks like collapse. Sometimes it is collapse.
What compels me — what kept me from slipping into the undertow as last week crumbled around me — is the audacity.
Not tidy progress or external praise or even confidence — it’s the raw, trembling nerve of trying again.
The gourd babies sprouting defiantly in the compost.
The bok choy steaming up its pizza-box nursery.
The drama-queen alocasia staging a death and double resurrection.
The cactus I didn’t ask for but couldn’t throw away.
The thumbnail-sized geranium, rooting in silence.
Last week almost swallowed me. There were moments — more than one — when I was all but spent. Where vanishing felt easier than continuing.
But I didn’t.
Because when everything felt like too much, these ridiculous, resilient scraps of life reminded me what I already knew:
Who am I to deny the bid for life?
Where some might have ignored the alocasia’s antics, or recomposted the gourd sprouts, or tossed the cactus outright, I couldn’t look away.
And it’s not just the plants. I made a commitment — to myself, and implicitly to others — as a curator, a creator, a witness. I made a bid. A wager. On the merit of my own voice. On the possibility that showing up matters; the hope that it counts for something.
That’s worth scratching and clawing and stumbling to honor.
So I’m here. Still writing. Still showing up.
Still making my own stubborn, improbable bid.
And if it’s messy — good.
Messy means the story isn’t over.
Messy is still alive. Still growing.
In this trembling, fragile world — where we control so little and feel so much — to keep going, to keep offering, to keep risking belief in something uncertain, something not guaranteed...
That is audacity.
Not the absence of fear, or struggle, or exhaustion; but the will to move anyway, however minutely, in spite of them.
Every act of reaching forward, reaching upward, reaching again.
Seeds don’t know what they’ll find above the soil.
Drought or deluge. Sunlight or shadow.
But if there’s life left, they try. They reach.
So must we.
