After all the rain we've had this past week, the fields and woods are really greening up around here! Now we very much need the rain to stop and the sun to shine for a few days, because it's planting time and we need to be able to work with the soil.
It sounds like Tuesday will be lovely. Tuesday folks, we'll take you out ramp foraging and then come back to the strawberry patch to see if we can't get the rest of the weeds cleared away from the plants and some compost spread around them so they'll have a good shot at producing nice berries this year.
Wednesday people, we'll have to see what the weather does. If it doesn't rain, we may try to get some plants and seeds in the ground! We may also check on our compost pile and see whether it's time to turn it.
One of the highlights of my time at the Great Lakes Intertribal Food Summit was meeting Rowen White, founder of Sierra Seeds (http://sierraseeds.org/). Here's a two and a half minute video in which she talks a bit about her approach to healing the wounds of colonization through food and seed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obx_UAAKfaE.
In one of our conversations, Rowen reminded me about the poet David Whyte, whose degree in marine zoology landed him on the Galapagos Islands. In an interview with On Being's Krista Tippet, Whyte says "I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos. Science, rightly, is always trying to remove the “I.” But I was really interested in the way that the “I” deepened the more you paid attention." (This isn't assigned listening/reading, but if you want to hear the whole interview, you can find it here: http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/transcript/8581.)
This rings true in my experience--that there are things afoot in the world that the "objective language" of science isn't able to comprehend and express at this time. I think that may be because there are certain things that you can know only when you give up the separateness required by objectivity and enter deeply into relationship (perhaps symbiosis is another word for it, connecting back to Rowen's video). The language of poetry is better suited for this kind of knowing. And so, this week, I give you poetry:
One by Wendell Berry:
The Man Born to Farming
The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
© Wendell Berry. This poem is excerpted from "The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry," Counterpoint Press. (http://www.onbeing.org/program/ellen-davis-and-wendell-berry-the-poetry-of-creatures/extra/the-man-born-to-farming-by)
And two by Marge Piercy:
The Seven Of Pentacles
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
~ Marge Piercy ~
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
from Circles on the Water. Copyright © 1982 by Marge Piercy.
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57673)
As you think about moving across the threshold of graduation and into this next phase in your life, what work calls to your heart? How will you put your love to use in the world?
No comments:
Post a Comment