Life, Mind and Garden Abuzz

We are, at this moment, getting slimed by a furious thunderstorm, slap-dab in the middle of a Sunday morning. The past 2 weeks have given us lots of rain.

Classic images of farmers will tell you that rain is good. I think of rain sometimes along with an image of a leather-faced farmer looking up to the sky, straw hat tipped upwards, along with eyebrows knit in concentrated hope. While our culture is on the whole disconnected from this reality, it remains a reality nonetheless that rain brings life.

And life abundantly. Two days ago I went to check on my garden, after taking a blissful break for a week while the rains came down. Again, absence made the growth more apparent; I was surprised that the vines had nearly carpeted the whole patch. The baby butternut squashes, barely existent the week before, had doubled in size. The greatest surprise waited in the summer squash bush, like an obese child playing hide-and-go-seek behind a lamppost. One squash lay, brilliant yellow, warty and swollen, nested in the arms of the plant. It was about two-thirds the length of my arm.

Greater shock yet remained. I pushed aside the furrily-spikey leaves of the zucchini plant to see whether it had yet decided to produce fruit. Bees and beetles buzzed beneath its canopy, and yellow flowers continued to unfurl daintily. Don’t be fooled by these fairy-like images, though. Because underneath at all, I finally discovered an ogre of a zucchini, stretched out and snoozing, camouflaged dark green under the plant. Uttering expletives of surprise, I pulled the thing off its vine (after photographing it, duh!), feeling it drool juice from this new wound out onto my fingers. It was heavy, several pounds, and the size of my lower leg. There was another, just inches shorter and ounces lighter.

Meanwhile, there are other fruits and vegetables in excess all over town. There’s a crabapple tree I know of that’s nearly ready to be shaken and freed of its rosy-green fruit, as well as a tree dripping with purple-gray plums outside the café where I work. I could be a full-time homesteader right now—picking, cutting, pitting, peeling, baking, freezing, drying, canning. There’s more around, and available for little to no cost, than we have time to prepare or put away.

This makes me wonder: Why seasons? Think about the contrast.

Now, it is summer. Color abounds, in landscape and in diet. Flowers cut from gardens (even from vacant lots, for the imaginative) endlessly adorn our tables. Our meals are stuffed with fruit of the land. First come the strawberries, followed by blueberries and melons. Beans, beets, broccoli, greens, peppers. And the corn—fresh and tender, exploding sweetness into the mouth. Fuzzy peaches, bumpy squash, plump cherries. One can be bored neither by the cuisine nor the activities of living, for the sun allows us to be out at all hours. Then there is the preservation of all things edible, which once occupied the summers of those on this land. This allowed not only for the nourishment of the body in times of scarcity, but also for variety in dullness. How sweet, lovely, and precious is a jar of homemade jam in the depths of winter, when we are just dying to see real, deep reds or blues on our plates! These things maintain the memory of warmer times.

Fast forward: Winter. Nothing grows here. We eat lots of animal products, and root vegetables stored in cellars somewhere. Pies and cakes are filled with spices, pumpkin (another veggie stored in cold, dark places), dried fruits, or nuts. We pay fortunes for fruits imported from other parts of the country or of the world and for meager portions of green things. In the meantime, we stare gloomily at barren landscapes of skeletal trees and drab colors.

Although the variety is enjoyable, it can also be a bit jarring. Sometimes, although I am always safe and fed, I feel like I will waste away in the winter. Why is it like this? Why such extremes of abundance and lack? I ask not because I am altogether ignorant of the mechanics of weather, but because I believe in a Maker who intentionally designed this part of the world to function in this way. Does not this entire world speak something from his heart? So what is it about the juxtaposition of seasons, the constant rhythm of yearning in winter and overflowing fullness in summer, that he wants to speak?

I want to raise the question, and mull over it a bit longer yet. For the time being, there are summery things to be done, providing a lovely opportunity for thought and discussion on the matter.

Summer Abundance

We are entering the fullness of summer. In past decades, centuries, summer was the time of abundance and fruitful work that, in many ways, sustained the rest of the year. Little House in the Big Woods (a recent and worthy literary foray) describes the bustle of this time, when Pa and friends would work the fields from dawn until dusk, while Ma and the children would be busy at home, putting away the fruits of the earth.

As a first-year vegetable gardener, I am newly, wonderfully being initiated into the rhythm that naturally governs this part of the world. With the enthusiasm of a novice, I prepared the ground and sowed seeds, all the while unsure that anything would be produced. Late May and early June caught my excitement; the seeds had begun to sprout and take root, forming small plants. The garden mothered by my roommate Wendy was beginning to produce lettuce and herbs.

Then I went away for a week. While I was gone, to the relief of my dog-fearing roommates, there was abundant rain and some sun. As I groggily looked out the kitchen window the morning following my return, I was thrilled to see a full-fledged garden: thriving herbs, happy tomatoes, abundant lettuce and chard. Evidence the Ziploc bag full of homegrown lettuce in the fridge and Wendy’s continual encouragement to give away lettuce and herbs to any visitors.

The full shock of summer came when I, several days later, made it over to my own garden-child, at the loft around the corner. The entire yard was grown up; there were weeds three feet high which had only been 6 inches when I left. A volunteer pumpkin plant had slashed its way another 4 feet through the tall brush (see Dana weeding around it in the photo). The dogs, as ever running happily around, resembled cheetahs speeding through the African brush. And the garden! Weeds I had not yet uprooted in the aisles had spread into a rough green shag carpet. Along the back wall, the sunflowers were nearly taller than I and beginning to form flowers. Bright zinnias had at last awoken, and the nasturtium with their red-orange blossoms formed an unruly base to the bed. Best of all, the vegetables were thriving: the beans formed a zealous two rows and were beginning to bear flowers and fruit, while the squash and melons were beginning to vine along and creep.

About when I spotted the zucchini, something changed for me. The two plants I had left of them were growing giant leaves bigger than my head from vines sturdy and furry. I imagined all the vining plants looking like that, and suddenly the garden seemed very small, and I knew that I was going to have a great deal of squash on my hands. It was no longer an uncertainty, but a concrete future happening that required preparation.

There awaits, therefore, a good deal of work to be done—not only in keeping a garden from becoming a jungle, or harvesting its fruit, but in putting its fruit to good use, honoring my own work, that of my friends, and of the land. As we discovered in picking cherries and jamming them, often the preservation is the greater of the two tasks. This is all well and good. I look forward to learning the art of canning and freezing and storing away, to finding the joy in the task and also in, with each one, easing a bit more the financial burden on a household like ours that yearns to host and serve and provide.

Steven Jones, gardening in style

Steven Jones was a tall, built Black man, decked out in well-fitting overalls, a long-sleeved thermal white shirt, aviator sunglasses, and a beat-up old straw hat. My roommate Dana and I went out to meet him outside the wood fence that encloses the land we garden on. Upon stepping out of the truck, he looked around with a mighty grin and said with enthusiasm, “Aww, we gardening in da HOOD!” We made our introductions and then, with pride, he showed us the plus-sized tiller he had rented for a special job and was going to open up on our little plot.

I had requested a tilling courtesy of the KCCG, who in turn gave my information to this fellow, who makes his living doing such things. For three weeks, I was frequently contacted by this Steven Jones, who, to my frustration, neither enunciated well, nor neatly ended a phone conversation with a goodbye. I put him off, wrapping up loose ends getting the space ready to be tilled. On the other hand, Steven appeared quite eager to get out and till our garden—so eager, in fact, that he managed to make me uncomfortable with his pushiness.

Finally, though, it was time to till. I was resolved to get it over with on Monday. Sure enough, Steven Jones called me just after lunch, and his first words were, “Maggie Sherman, it’s a beautiful day to till a garden!” I rushed home and, being by now a little wary of this dude, collected roommate Dana for safety.

And though I expected to be creeped out or annoyed, I was delighted. I love it when that happens.

Steven unloaded the tiller. Throwing his whole body into the it with gusto, he devoured not only the space we had cleared, but also the margins I had left full of rubble—almost like a hungry (yet endearing) monster. When he had finished, he brought me out onto the tilled ground, remarking that it was “like walking on air,” as if it were a great, rare pleasure in life. Picking up a handful of soil, he told me that it was good and full of nutrients.

As I signed his paperwork, I asked Steven how he had gotten into gardening. Growing up in the hood, he learned how to work land from his grandparents. Now he tills and gardens for a living. In fact, he’ll plant vegetables anywhere he thinks is a good place. “You mean, like guerilla gardening?” I asked (having heard about this wonderful movement where folks plant things here and there and everywhere, regardless of ownership or permission). He chuckled and said, “Yeah, kind of like that,” and told us about how he sells bowls of vegetables to people who are skeptical at first and then amazed when he reveals that he grew them himself. “I’m gonna check back up on you guys,” he told us, again showing pleasure at our location and ambitions.

After we had shut the gate and Steven was back in his truck, Dana and I heard him cackling loudly. “I like that, Maggie,” he yelled. “I’m gonna use that. Guerilla gardening.” He started the truck and drove off.

Won't you be my neighbor?

When I was a little girl, I was even more of a bookworm than I am today, for lack of knowing what else to do. I remember lounging in bed on Saturday mornings, before my parents were up. On such mornings, I often chose an American Girl book from my shelf, as these were easy and brief, able to be devoured in one sitting, like any good breakfast. These books not only entertained me, but they gave flesh and bones to my meager imaginations of American history.

My favorite Girl was Kirsten. She was the daughter of Swedish immigrants, living and farming in the Midwest somewhere. Kirsten, blond hair coiled in braids, got into all sorts of tangles; I especially remember an incident with a black bear. From sitting on the sidelines of Kirsten’s life, I learned about the kind of farm life (albeit romanticized and simplified) that my own great-grandparents experienced but never were able to share with me: immigrants, homesteading, agriculture—even Indians.

This long-tucked-away memory has come floating back to me this week. Our own agricultural enterprise is underway; there’s a small garden plot slowly getting larger as we sift through rubble. Though it’s just the end of March, I’ve got a farmer’s tan well on its way, calluses are forming nicely on my palms, and my arms and shoulders are feeling strong and energized from all the shovel work.

I’ve spent hours out there in the last two weeks, and it’s been really good to labor outside, observing nature at work in various ways. I expected that, and it’s great. There has been a surprise benefit, however. As Dana and I have walked around the corner at the end of the block, we’ve gotten to see some of our neighbors, a family who lives there, in a great, burnt-orange, turn-of-the-century house. The guy has been out working and always turns to greet us with a smile and hello. A week ago we officially met and shared our own general garden missions. This simple situation left my heart warm with goodwill, because this part of town is not typically so friendly. I think people are intimidated into staying inside.

Then there was a neighborly gesture in the form of a kind donation. My friend Alan from the Café responded to my inquiries about fencing by offering just the thing to shut out the two giant dogs who will guard our garden and keep out the little munchy critters: three cattle panels (I didn’t know what they were, but they’re 12-foot long, 4-foot high, steel framed panels). Not only that, but I borrowed my sister’s little red truck for the week, and he loaded and rigged them on tiny truck bed for me so I could make the trek back home. All on his day off.

To complete the endeavor, my dad gave me of those marvelous steel posts you can easily drive into the ground, so I’ll have something to attach the cattle panels to.

Then today, I happened to mention the fact that our wheelbarrow is sick with a flat tire (you know, because I only talk garden these days) in the company of Eddie, Tom and Alan, and Gabriel, another frequenter of the Café. Immediately Gabe piped in and said he’d fix it. He is (among other, very interesting things) a retired race-car driver, and very capable with all things mechanical, so I accepted his offer, and will soon have a functional wheelbarrow.

I feel so wonderfully taken care of by these guys. I’ve been very independent and proud most of my life, unable to acknowledge need or accept help with much grace. But the good Lord has been teaching me, largely through the generosity and neighborliness of these individuals, to receive. When I accept gifts (of the hands and of the heart), I find each time that bonds are strengthened and friendship is formed. From these gifts of fencing and tire repair, I understand that someone stands behind my efforts and believes in what I’m striving for. They, in turn, get the knowledge that they are needed, useful. And let’s be honest: we all need that.

This is what I remember from Kirsten’s community, and they were (I understand) widespread practices in farming communities across the land: barn-raising and corn-husking parties. Men, women, and children would rally together to help each other. There was an understanding of being a body: “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

Wholesome

This is a word that, to most of us, has lost its luster. It’s become a dowdy, old-fashioned, and really, altogether undesirable adjective. We don’t want it to describe us, for fear of sounding prudish, nor our lifestyle, lest it make us seem irrelevant (God forbid!). Wholesome food makes us wrinkle our noses and expect a nasty, perhaps fibrous mess; wholesome television programming promises to put us to sleep.

But let it be known that I am, from today forward, pulling for a renaissance—if not for this word, then for what it comes from and what it implies. Think about where it comes from. Whole. What does that even mean? For starters: “In an unbroken or undamaged state; in one piece.” Hello!

How my life feels compartmentalized, broken in pieces! Work. Home. Family. Boiler Room friends. College friends. Other friends. Cooking. Exercise. Entertainment. Prayer. All are like little drawers with parts that rarely touch. This feeds discontent and loneliness in a way I don’t understand fully. All I know is that socializing is relegated to sitting in a coffee shop or across a dinner table, and the other activities are done mainly alone.

Today was a perfectly lovely day. I had time to myself this morning, then did some food preparation since we’ve had little food prepared in the fridge this last week. Early afternoon, I headed out with two roommates to the KC Community Gardens to sign up for a membership and get some seeds for the spring/summer garden. We talked garden all the way there and back, discussing various methods of fertilizing and pest control, and by the time we got home I was fired up to get started.

My roomies and I chatted while I tested the pH of the soil of the soon-to-be garden plot our landlords have given us access to next to their loft building, which is feet away from Troost, a ghost-town-like avenue that is Kansas City’s line of demarcation between Black and White, wealth and poverty. I cooked some beans that had been soaking and got bread ready to put in the oven before heading down the block to the garden, galoshes squeaking and shovel in newly-gloved hand.

For an hour and a half, my roommate Dana and I attacked an area of maybe 4’x6’ within the 20’x30’ plot we have permission to use. See, the space used to be covered by a twenty-four-plex apartment building, which was demolished years ago, leaving the soil littered feet deep with rubble like a bombed-out city. Some of the stones are huge and would wreck a tiller, so we’re essentially clearing the debris so that it can soon be tilled for use. The sun, hidden for several days now behind its covers of mist and clouds, came out of bed to join us and bathed us in golden, late-afternoon light. Dana and I shared life stories and prayed for our neighborhood while getting some serious exercise and actually doing something productive.

As I dug rocks, tile, brick, and muddy strands of 70’s-orange carpet out of the soil, I was happy and enthusiastic in a way I haven’t been in months. That little bit of dirt scattered with massive pile of dog poop and weeds is hope to me, and it’s bigger and more complicated than I can easily explain. Suffice it to say that I have come to believe that simple, time-consuming work done in the company of dear ones is a balm to many of the things that ail us in this day and age. I cook from scratch, mend clothes, and will garden because I think that it’s more wholesome to do so. In the sense that doing these things, and inviting others to join me, brings the parts closer together.

thinking about thinking about God

Do most people have times when they emotionally and behaviorally revert back to being a 13-year-old? That has happened to me recently. It’s a feeling I know well and associate with a particular period of my life when my roommates in college were “progressing” in life, in my eyes, and I felt jealous and annoyed and overlooked. I’m ashamed to admit that, because I couldn’t at the time put those words to it, the feelings simply were expressed by not looking close people in the eyes, stomping, slamming doors and the like. Ugly sorts of behavior.

From a certain point of view, it’s amazing that it’s been so long since I was in the damp haze of such a melancholy confusion. On the other hand, now I’m used to a certain degree of comfort, clarity and brightness; shadow is disconcerting, to say the least. What scares me the most about those periods is the way the joy and wisdom and love I think I possess seem to be shaken off of me like leaves off a tree in late autumn. It’s very, agonizingly humbling.

Suddenly, I feel quite small and frail. My faith is fragile, my good works conditional, my love tentative.

So, somewhere in all this, I’ve been trying to think about God. This might seem elementary. You might think I should think about God all the livelong day. Au contraire: sadly, but not surprisingly, I am a self-absorbed human like most, and I would conjecture that I spend 98% of my thought on myself, 1.5% on others, and .5% on God. Maybe. The more I think of myself, the worse things get for me, the more confused and unhappy I become. Isn’t that odd?

A fellow named Brother Lawrence, a French monk in the 17^th century, wrote a series of letters in which he advocates for the “Practice of the Presence of God.” These come today compiled in a paperback about a quarter of an inch thick, and the first several times I attempted to read them, I thought the guy was a total simpleton and the book a waste of time. The main idea, and Brother Lawrence’s solution for everything, is to think about God at all times. It’s like Windex to the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: apply it to fix any ailment.

Maybe your experience is different, but I find truly thinking about God to be excruciating. It makes my mind stretch beyond all limits. The image of a robot that has short-circuited comes to mind—you know, the head starts spinning super-fast, smoke comes out the cracks, and then sparks, and eventually the whole thing explodes.

Come on, try it. Think about God: self-sufficient, created by none and the sustainer of all that is created, three in one, the force that is ever expanding the universe and yet is in each particle of the invisible atom… Ouch, right? What is He thinking, being so far beyond what the mind He created can understand? I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. This is hard for me: the surrender of understanding, the embrace of mind-boggling, and the acceptance of even the possibility that a more important reality lays beneath the visible, comprehensible surface of life.

Ugh. And…awesome! Don’t we really hope that that’s the truth? That there’s more to all of this than meets our own meager comprehension? Does it not produce a bit of awe in us? Is not that alone a good jumping-off point for some kind of worship?

I’m certainly no guru. These are the kinds of dialogues I have with God, in the context of trust built on the way He’s been true to me in the past and what the Bible says about His character as good, loving, faithful. Sometimes I fear that because he’s let me off the leash, I’ll roam too far in my thoughts and wander off a cliff, so to speak. But the Bible also says that what He begins in us, he is faithful to complete. That’s a good thing to cling onto when the fears come a’chasin’.

How can I not write about AVATAR?

There's a movie out right now called Avatar. If you didn't know that, read a newspaper or magazine every now and again, for crying out loud. Having heard good things from people in my life who are decent judges of film, I went to see this new flick with some friends on New Year's Day. In 3-D, if you were wondering.

Holy Schnikey! Oh my goodness! Wonder! Tears! Joy!

The thing simply blew me away. There was a moment when I found my jaw dropped, and tears flowing at the beauty of the fictitious planet Pandora. I was impressed and stunned by all kinds of brilliantly breathtaking attributes of this planet. The flora and fauna of Pandora were bright and intricately detailed, and you could actually see them and felt like you could touch them.

I could rant and rave for a while, but I don't want to spoil anything or prattle on repeating your own experience of this movie. On the other hand, note that I am writing about a movie. This, I assure you, is a rare occurrence. As my sister said to me in surprise at my approval of Avatar, "You don't usually love movies." (That's her nice way of saying that I usually pick them apart. Oops.) Why I'm excited about Avatar goes beyond the movie itself. In the last couple of days, I realized when I say I loved Avatar, I'm really saying I'm thrilled out of my mind about the creative possibilities that it has opened.

The last year or so has changed my mind about the created product. Though I grew up reading, watching television and movies, listening to music and reproducing it on the piano, I never really understood the point. And let's face it: while I'm creative, I'm also ridiculously practical, and so part of me felt guilty about the fact that I spent copious amounts of time creating and "consuming" the creations of others. I was confounded by the job description of my friend Linnea, an intelligent-times-ten and absurdly glorious artist:

"I make something totaly useless, yet absolutely necessary."

Huh? What? Useless and necessary can go together? In time, and with the steady encouragement of another artist friend, I am coming to agree with Linnea. I don't have any complex rational proofs or anything, but for me it comes down to this: When I read Tolkien or Lewis, when I listen to Debussy, and when I watched Avatar for the first time, something deep inside of me comes alive. This little creature--maybe it is Imagination, or Beauty--may remain confined in the little box of my life where I am reading or listening or watching, but it is more likely to continue to wiggle about in my head after it has been awakened. And soon, it stays with me throughout my day, and lends to the most common experience a sense of wonder and possibility.

The other thing about the products of artists is that they give you a glimpse inside the artist. An artist finds a way to create, outside of their imaginations, what exists inside their imagination. Having a very active imagination myself, and also having tried my hand at creation many a time, I can safely say that this is very tricky. Bringing a whole person into being using only words? Forming a crispy onion skin with the strokes of a pencil and the round root vegetable on flat paper? Flooding a cathedral with water using notes on a piano? It's HARD! It's time-consuming and imperfect and sometimes costly. Yet, when it is done, there is something that never was before.

This is why I loved Avatar. I know millions of dollars were put into its creation, at least hundreds of people contributed to it, and it still remains a cliche story with an anti-war agenda. I don't care. Avatar changes the game, because it made a world that doesn't exist, with its own culture and biology, in more clarity than I've ever seen. And it's beautiful. More!