On the Importance of a Garden

There are some few things, that to partake of them, is to become Divine... like making love, like walking and talking with your lover, like creating a work of art... and like taking a bit of abandoned space and building soil and planting a garden... "Resistance and Contemplation" take on new depths of meaning when falling in love with seeds and soil...
 
​Ah! To build fertile, sacred, soil! I've done that once before, in California: taking a bit of heavy clay and for three years adding lawn clippings, leaves, and mulch to build something that could grow something other than an extraordinarily determined wild "weed"... And by the time that we left California for our new beginning in the Midwest, we had a good, four to six inches of topsoil in our garden: in that Central Coast climate, Swiss Chard, Brussel Sprouts, Kale, and other veggies could grow year-round...

When we ended up in River Falls, Wisconsin, our newly constructed house was surrounded by rock and sand: a situation even more challenging than our California clay. Neighbors had already started a compost site: good! We began by turning the "soil" and mixing in sawdust, leaves, and lawn clippings we retrieved from the City composting site. We "stuck" a few plants in the "new soil" along with a bird feeder: filled with sunflower seeds. Cardinals, Goldfinches, and a few other seed eaters feasted and tossed uneaten seeds about the area. Soon, we had dozens of Sunflowers growing! A delightful garden of advancing Sunflowers became our first Wisconsin garden experience: which served our grand purpose of building the soil: Sunflowers are usually always a great lead-crop for building soil just about anywhere...

We are now into our third summer of gardening here: we have nearly four inches of top soil with seasonal tulips, lilies, lilac, coneflowers, chives, mint, an apple tree, a raised bed with tomatoes, peppers, lemon grass, lavender, nasturtiums, carrots, and onions... and out back, near the small city-forest, we have a garden dedicated to the Divine Mother: statues of Kuan Yin, Mother Mary, Tara, and Our Lady of the Corn, are complimented by two more apple trees, a variety of berry bushes, squash, melons, lilies, marigolds, dappled willow bushes, native prairie grasses, iris, and a Rose of Sharon... A fire ring is surrounded by small re-purposed rocks plucked from the garden as we worked the soil... a picnic table and chairs complete this "working" and "meditation" garden... The bird feeder that stands at the edge of the garden welcomes cardinals, goldfinches, and, believe it or not, but also a wandering pair of Western Tanagers... rabbits scurry about in both the dawn and dusk hours, a woodchuck ambles about feeding on the wildflowers, and deer as well visit around our house and garden: perhaps they are the ones who have already eaten most of the apples...

Even if it is just a single planter-box in a window that gets regular sunlight, or on a small porch, plant and grow something! Herbs grow well in small pots or planter boxes: chives, rosemary, cilantro: grow something! This "growing something" is a vital "root" for the regeneration of this precious blue Planet! Corporate power wants all of us dependent upon them for our food, for our water, and for the air that we breathe: an element of resistance to their abuse of power is the action of gardening: if we all grow something that we will eat, then that food will become the very flesh of our resistance! There is nothing whatsoever that is more sacred than our bodies and the bodies of our children! As we build soil, plant seeds, care for the burgeoning life in our gardens and homes, feed our children, our friends, and ourselves, we are already building a new society within the shell of the old: and that is not a little thing...