Weeding in January

Reading Ellen Davis' book has me wanting to get my hands in the dirt, reconnect with Earth.  It makes me want to do everything differently, get back to my Mother.  It reminds me of my childhood in the mountains of Colorado, where the land was home, playground, comforter, teacher.  I remember coming through St. Louis to visit my grandparents in Belleville when I was about 12 or 13.  I remember seeing all the concrete, the cars, the tall buildings.  So foreign to what I knew back home.  And I was thinking "none of this is real.  Its all made up reality."  It isn't really real.  The structures we've built, the society we've constructed.  Its all made up stuff. Unfortunately, our 'alternative reality' - a reality that hordes the resources offered for free and appropriates the bounty of Earth for the privileged few, robbing from the 'least of these' - is destroying what is real.  Its becoming the only reality, at the expense of the God created, God infused, God intended reality.  And, because its fake, it cannot sustain life.  But its sticky.  It traps us like flies in a web and we can't see our way out of it.  

I love what the Introduction to Arthur Walker-Jones' The Green Psalter suggests - that Earth is the Body of God.  If we think of Earth as not just planet, but all living organisms - including us - the entire ecosystem, I think that might be spot on.  All of us connected in the Body of God.  But that might be too small.  Even the Cosmos is part of God - God' encompasses, embodies, breathes through all that we know.  And probably more than what we know.  And yet, our reverence for the Body has evaporated - if it was ever intact in the first place.  Certainly there have been and are a few who live out that reverence.  The pagans.  The Native Americans.  The agrarian prophets.  But most of us think only of ourselves and those closest to us - a tiny fraction of the entire Body - as if that were all that was important.  

To get out of that mindset seems next to impossible.  So, I follow my instinct on reading Davis and I get out in my tiny raised bed vegetable garden.  I gave it a rest from tomatoes last season and grew herbs and greens.  Like most seasons, though, the garden got away from me by mid summer.  The chard did amazingly well, though periodic lack of water made the leaves a bit too bitter.  I resolved to finally get out there and clear it out, though.  Get it ready for winter.  It seemed strange to be weeding in January - the ground should be frozen by now and its barely even cool.  But it was satisfying, as it always is.  As I dug and hoed and pulled, I thought about a Wendell Berry quote in Davis' book, asking "what the land requires of us."  What do you require, I wonder and I tend my neglected little patch of earth.  The abundance of weeds suggests to me "if you don't grow something, I will."  The land has a will to flourish.  It only requires either mindful cooperation or total freedom.  Anything else will be disastrous for all of us.