Becoming Plant Becoming Cool Becoming Free
by
Amy S. Morgenstern
Effort—is the sole condition—
Patience of Itself—
—Emily Dickinson
Fearlessness is what love seeks
—Hannah Arendt
She now walks in peace
And lives in the safety of peace
—Therigatha
Becoming Plant, 2009. Video still from a seven-hour performance.
When someone hears that I once dug a hole and planted myself in the earth at Pt. Reyes National Park’s Sky Camp #5, one September day in 2009, staying there for seven hours from early afternoon to dusk, they often ask me what it was like.
“Cool, and then cold.”
They also ask why.
“Because I wanted to grow,” I tell them, “Or at least try.”
Also, because the shock of the Great Recession on the heels of the baseless, costly Iraq War (with its many international crimes waged by a regime openly deriding the “reality-based community”) left a distinct collective sense of being ground down and groundless, a kind of “mass depression” (Suskind 2004; Rich 2003). Humans had made such a mess. Best to escape their noise. Maybe the nonhuman could help heal.
And because—in tandem with the sad derailment of America in the 2000s—my own adulthood, contrary to my very best intentions, was proving to be an extended exercise in decomposition. I was wondering if grafting myself to the earth, albeit temporarily, might provide a fresh perspective. Perhaps, like Antonin Artaud, I could put myself in a state of “impossible absurdity” to create spaces for life “which did not exist and which did not seem to belong in actual space” (Artaud 1988, 79).
When I first presented the video in 2010 and wrote about it for my MFA graduation exhibition, I was intrigued by the idea of creating an overly long work in which nothing really happens except, of course, the passage of time. I wanted to lure viewers into taking a break from habitual patterns of consciousness, jolt them into a more raw form of awareness, and extend an invitation to the edge of the social contract, for its reinvention.
In 2018, when I resurrected the piece for a feminist art show in San Francisco, I’d become preoccupied with geobiologist Hope Jahren’s admiration for plant endurance—for the way plants stay there and take it (Jahren 2016). Its uncanny resonance with philosopher Donna Haraway’s admiration for trouble, notably “staying with the trouble,” led me to pose the paradox that staying actually stirs things up. After all, I reasoned, plants do turn dirt and shit into sugar. In the show notes, I query: What if we stayed instead of moved? With the trouble, with a friend (or an enemy), with oneself…?
So, what was it like planting myself for seven hours? Skin to earth, it was like receiving a geothermic blueprint I could barely decipher at the time, one that would unfold into consciousness over years—sort of like getting a sacred text you know you’re going to read every day for the rest of your life.
Almost a decade later, in 2019, while attending a course on women and Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center, I made the deepest discovery of what was at play in my performance: to understand through my bones that the earth is cold, and that is OK.
Such was the inaugural lesson that Patacara, the early legendary Buddhist nun and friend and spiritual equal of the Buddha, learns when she meets Gautama. Having lost her husband to a poisonous snake, her firstborn to a raging river, her newborn to a hungry hawk, and the rest of her family to a roof collapsed from torrential rain, Patacara shows up at Jeta Grove, where the Buddha is teaching, as a total mess. Her family members’ bodies are still burning on the funeral pyre. She is stripped of all, including clothing, only to be told he can’t help her.
“Sister, recover your presence of mind,” the Buddha advises. He cannot help her because no one can. She must rise to the occasion herself. And she does so brilliantly (Murcott 1991, 33).
According to the Therigatha, a collection of freedom poems by early female Buddhist leaders from the sixth century BCE (and the first anthology of women’s literature in the world), Patacara became a master at turning raw vulnerability into psychological strength. A revered teacher with a sizable following of her own, she is praised for pointing her disciples “toward the highest goal” and “pulling the arrow out of their hearts” so they could attain it. For many women, simply meeting Patacara was a turning point in their lives—like “splitting open the mass of mental darkness.” Even the Buddha noted that “Patacara is unique” (Collett 2014, 55).
Curiously, it is unknown whether Patacara refers to an actual historical figure or whether she represents a composite of women known at the time to have channeled their naked anguish into monumental spiritual leadership. One finds her story melded, for example, with that of another famous bhikkhunī—a fully ordained Buddhist nun in the early sangha—Kisagotami, known for wandering her village with her dead baby in her arms, asking for medicine to cure him (Collett 2014). Indeed, in the original Pali, the name Patacara refers to one who wanders without a covering (Collett 2014).
Becoming acquainted with these stories and unraveling their significance in conversation with others in the sparse, intimate basement classroom of the downtown Zen Center, I came to understand something I had no words for yet: that grief, unwitnessed, becomes the ground itself. My professional career crushed by deterritorialized white academics at the turn of the century, my castrated/decapitated existence since then all made me wonder if, in the eyes of everyone around me, in the last twenty years or so, I had been like Patacara standing stark naked before the gates of the grove. Even more disturbing, yet fitting, was the thought that I was like Kisagotami, roaming around life with my murdered voice, asking for medicine when the rest of the world (including some of my closest feminist friends and my own mother) had decided I should accept its death and move on. Was I too raw for the rest of the world?
In the end, I think I was driven to the earth because no one wanted to deal with a walking wounded like me. If my grief were an arrow in the heart, picture everyone around me pretending it was not there. Luckily, in 2018, about a year before taking the Buddhism and Women class, I learned about the social phenomenon of grief fatigue through the story of Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter Jessi was murdered in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater mass shooting. “They want you to move on with your life,” Lonnie Phillips explains. “They want you to get back to normal. My own brother said to me: ‘You’re not the same as you were.’ They see it as we’re obsessed with it” (Glass 2018).
It turns out that many parents of mass shooting victims suffer the same social dynamic. Because it’s hard for the unafflicted to understand a grief that never fades, even those closest to them disappear, leaving bereft parents to find support networks and new friendships among themselves. Well now, I realized, if loved ones can’t rally around parents who’ve lost their children to a mass shooting—a concrete, physical form of evil leading to palpable loss—then, of course, no one would be hanging around my sorry ass while I mourned my dead feminist voice, this abstract psychological thing barely recognized or welcome anywhere. But outside of society, the earth would let me lament, for as long as I’d like, as long as I could.
Had I lived in Northern India in the fifth century BCE, there might have been a community of free women to direct me out of my grief. At the ancient sangha, one found not only women like Patacara who’d suffered sudden personal loss but also those who’d escaped prostitution, arranged marriages, and familial abuse. Others were orphaned, refused to do as they were told, bored with their traditional lives, or simply done living according to the stereotypes imposed upon women: “women as stupid, as devoted daughters, as obsessed with their bodies and adornments, as temptresses, as obsessed with childbearing, and as old ugly hags” (Tsomo 1999).
In short, these women fled the fuckery of patriarchy—successfully. And they were damn proud of themselves, so proud they sung gathas announcing their freedom to the world.
Perhaps I dug a hole, planted myself in it, filmed it, and have never really stopped writing about the experience because it has become my gatha—my way of fleeing fuckery into the embrace of a stillness that could lift me up and lead to song.
In fact, after emerging from the earth in 2009, I became systematic about retrieving my true spirit. I built an educational business to provide myself with material stability. With stability came mental health treatment. With mental health support, I could brace myself to face the horror of my loss. Steady success in business with dedicated collaborators and a safe work environment made it clear that I was not the problem. With a community of cool people around me, I could start to believe in myself again. Believing in myself meant summoning a voice that turned out to be dormant, not dead. And here we are.
Now, in early 2026, more than thirty years after a high-ranking professor forbade me from writing my feminist philosophical vision, and despite our current strong-man era making the Bush years feel like a cakewalk, I despair less and love more. I solve problems and plan, getting down to business to make things happen. I’ve created daily cleansing somatic rituals like the Buddhist vinaya to offset my chronic PTSD. And I sit with what bothers me. I stay with the trouble, even if my critical thinking irritates the fuck out of everyone else. A student of life, I’ve learned from the very best—Patacara, Socrates, Dickinson, and Hannah Arendt (to name a few). Rather than strive for “success” and social cred in Silicon Valley, I’ve eased into a lineage that was waiting for me all along, once I managed to cut through that mass of mental darkness. And the more I cut through, the more I feel I’m coming ever closer to being able to announce, as Uttara, a student of Patacara, once did: “I have become cool, free.”
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1988. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver. University of California Press.
Collett, Alice. 2014. Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History. Oxford University Press.
Glass, Ira, host. 2018. This American Life. Episode 659, “Before the Next One.” October 12. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/659/before-the-next-one.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Jahren, Hope. 2016. Lab Girl. Alfred A. Knopf.
Murcott, Susan. 1991. The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha. Parallax Press.
Paulson, Steve. 2017. “Lab Girl Author Discusses Women, Science, Life Lessons from Childhood.” Wisconsin Public Radio. Accessed January 2026. https://www.ttbook.org/interview/lab-girl-author-discusses-women-science-life-lessons-childhood.
Rich, Frank. 2003. “The Spoils of War.” New York Times, April 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/06/opinion/the-spoils-of-war.html.
Suskind, Ron. 2004. “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” New York Times Magazine, October 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html.
Tsomo, Karma Lekshe. 1999. Women in Buddhist Traditions. New York University Press.