I used to play a lot of competitive sports: gymnastics, football, tennis, athletics, swimming, volleyball, and softball: the list could on and on and on and on. I thought I knew all the muscles in my body by now, but working with a pickaxe brought an entirely new level of awareness. The last time I played barefoot in the dirt with my bare hands was as a child making mud pies. This time I was massaging and pruning soil, touching it as if for the first time.
Bit by bit I have been engaging in all the activities I conjured up for my dream adventure, my treasure hunt. I took that Alaskan cruise, and trip to Long Island. I go swimming in the ocean in the mornings. I communicate with the ancestors. There is one thing I was ‘slunking’ on big time, making up all sorts of excuses to put off. Finally, I am taking on the challenge to learn to grow things. When the spirit moves you to do something, the decision is not logical or intellectual. You just move into action. On Saturday the spirit moved me to begin, and I went crazy clearing a 10 foot by 10 foot plot of land for a backyard vegetable garden.
Many people speak about the benefits of growing your own food, and getting back to nature; so much so it is almost cliché. It just goes to show information does not lead to behavior change. Once again, I got a spark to my spirit. This time I think my Aunty Gaynel passed it on to me. I asked her one question about gardening, and it sent her into a motivational speech. She showed me her garden, gave me a book, and made me realize the thing to do was to get going. I guess the way her spirit glowed and her enthusiasm to share was irresistibly attractive to my spirit.
First my father was annoyed. I literally nagged him from in front of the television, where he was watching his weekend football games. I needed approval of my choice of location, help to measure the plot, and help to lay the temporary wooden frames. Then he was perplexed, when he saw me pick up the machete and pickaxe. Every week our gardener comes to help out with the yard. “You don’t have to do that now,” he said, as if to really mean, ‘I will pay someone to do that for you’. My mother was also perplexed, probably because she had a déjà vu feeling of being a child watching her mother in the garden all over again.
It took me about four laborious hours to clear the land. I could not help but imagine the type of slave I would have been. I could not help but be moved to a deeper level of appreciation for the farmers who grow our food. It made me contemplate, the more we detach ourselves from the land, and the processes of nature, the more disconnected we are from our humanity, the more fragmented we become.
I give thanks for the spark to my spirit. I give thanks for the fertile soils that nourish our food. I give thanks for the farming hands that nurture our crops. I give thanks for the living food that sacrifices itself for my sustenance.