Early May rain

I'm waiting.

Waiting for the rain to stop. Waiting for the soil to dry enough to till. Waiting to collect my soil sample for analysis. Waiting to get seeds into the ground.

Gardening teaches us about right relationship, about respect, about patience. If there is anything over which I have no control, it would be the schedule of rain showers. Where one has no control, one may choose to fight (images of China shooting clouds to make rain come to mind), or one can learn to dance, moving with a rhythm you did not create, synchronizing your movement with another's. In some instances, we can use force to bend nature to our will. Rather than meander over forested hills, we blow holes through the middle, creating map-ready straight lines.

But, really, you can't till mud. It just don't work, no matter how fancy your technology.

I'm in love with my soil. I'm in love with my compost. I'm fascinated by the ecosystem that thrives in one ounce of well-amended soil. In his first book, Second Nature, Michael Pollan offers the garden as a model for how humans can interact with the world in a way that is both beneficial to us, and to "nature." I use the quotes because this distinction between us humans and the "natural world" is wholly contrived, and feeds the negative dichotomy that allows us to continue to justify our dominion over the land and its non-human creatures. The alternative to dominion is stewardship. We and the "natural world" can both thrive if our relationship to this planet and the other creatures on it is one of respect and restraint. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

I scoop compost out of my bucket with my hand, and in my palm I hold an ecosystem more amazing than anything we humans have made. This planet has been at this living stuff for a really long time, and has gotten really darn good at it. I can create the causes and conditions that allow that handful of compost to arise, but I cannot create the life within it. Even a life that I could carry inside me for nine months, I cannot truly create.

When I was nine, I went to the beach with my dad, stepmom, and some friends of theirs. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are as different as the Appalachian and Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Pacific pounds the rocks of the slowly receding California coastline, like the western mountains jut, ragged and treeless into thinning air. The Atlantic is a more gentle ocean, softer, like the rolling, worn ridges of broadleaf deciduous forest that make up the Appalachian chain.

I was a strong swimmer as a kid, but I was, nonetheless, a nine year old up against the Pacific. Somehow I got myself caught in a hard undertow. I could dive under the waves, letting them pass over me and draw me toward the shore, but I couldn't set my feet or fight the rushing stream of water heading back out to the west. I was stuck. Bobbing up and down, trying to swim in. I could see my father and his friends on the beach, but I was too far away, and no one was looking for me. I was getting tired.

Finally, I got within range of some people standing in the surf, and as the wave started to rush backward, pulling all the sand from under my feet and tugging me away, I thrust out my hand toward this man. I don't remember that I could even manage to ask for help, though I imagine that my child's face conveyed that I was in distress.

I may owe my life to a smiling brown-skinned man who reached for the outstretched arm of a little huera child he did not know. I would not recognize him if I were to see him, but his smile and firm grip on my hand, freeing me from the ocean will remain forever in my memory. As I gasped for air, I found I could finally stand. I thanked him profusely. I doubt he had any idea that he saved my life.

I hope that he accumulated vast merit for his act of kindness, perhaps seemingly small to him, but on which the whole of my life likely hangs. The teachings tell us that karma multiplies--small actions can have huge results. May his be the seed for his enlightenment.

When people say that the world is hard and angry and closed, I feel sorry for them. My world is filled with strangers who would help an unknown child in distress, who get off the bus during the morning commute to assist a stranger collapsed in the street, people who rescue animals, people who rally behind the story of a little, lost squirrel, people who care to treat the ground under their feet with kindness, and who thank the earth for the abundance of blessings it bestows upons us, with neighbors who care for one another with a bowl of soup, a lent tool, or by lending a hand when you've clearly bitten off more than you can chew.

In life, as in the garden, we reap what we sow. The difference is that, in the garden, if I drop a radish seed here, a radish will grow after a set period of time here. If I were to plant a square of radishes and then fret and complain that I DON'T HAVE ANY CORN!! you'd call me a madwoman. In life it is the same--the seeds we plant in it will ripen, but in life our actions are bitty drops in a huge interconnected and interdependent web, so, unlike in our garden, we don't always know when and where our seeds will germinate and grow. The seeds of hatred will come back to us in the form of angry people. The kindness we give will eventually find its way back to us.

Some people pray, down on their knees, hands pressed together, heads bowed before their Lord.

So too, do I kneel down on the earth, hands cupping my precious soil, filled with life that I cannot create--a brilliant miraculous system on which our very lives depend. Stewarding this tiny, yet vast and complicated ecosystem is one long, living prayer--an act of both faith and humility. A supplication for sustenance.

Namasté.

[orginally written May 2009]