It’s November and even the mid-day shadows grow long–the sun slips over the horizon before 5 PM now.
It’s near dark when I walk home, crossing our town green, as I do several hundred times a year.
There’s mystery in the shadows. Our ancestors saw spirits, and so will you if you lurk outside during dusk. The animals are aware of you, and so, I suspect, are the trees.
Sweet potatoes from the garden, November 2017.
As winter looms, I watch the light change under my feet. (I look down a bit more now that I am getting older–the roots of the sycamore are determined to get me.)
But here is where words fail–when you walk at dusk over the fallen leaves, when it’s not quite light enough to see colors yet not so dark you cannot sense the colors, the edges of each leaf appear to glow as long as you keep moving.
No doubt there is some neuro-evolutionary advantage to this, some physiological explanation, some modern means of dispelling any reference to magic.
Clams raked from local waters, given freely to anyone with a rake and some time.
We had stumbled on a locals pub in Galway, away from the center of town, and we were still clumsily feeling our way in Ireland.
A waiter sensed our confusion, and took phenomenal care of us as we bumbled through the pub. A local pub has local people with local habits.
We wanted to tip, but did not know how much–people who work in pubs are not servants, and tipping in pubs is generally not done. So we asked, and she told us:
Nothing is enough.
And, of course, nothing is enough, and nothing is enough.
We need some things, true–decent food, clean water, safe shelter, and people we love. But most things we think we need are more than enough.
What we think we need defines who we are. What we think we need separates humans from the other mammals.
Nonmember harvest
It’s OK to want more than you need; most of us do, and our culture’s economy depends on you doing just that.
Beyond our basic needs, knowing nothing is enough will, depending on how you read it, make life wonderful or make you miserable.
Sometimes knowing nothing is enough is enough to give you the world.
The rich dirt still gives the way it usually does–a slight resistance before the earth yields to my finger, poking a hole into the garden ground again. I’ve done it thousands and thousands of times, and each time brings me joy.
Pea plant rising from the earth.
We eat from the garden–last night it was frozen tomatoes and fresh basil. (The basil is under lights in the basement, sitting in pots filled with dirt from the garden, which will be returned to the garden.)
Decent dirt has a heady aroma, difficult to describe if you do not pay attention to dirt, but a smell any gardener will tell you is enough to get us on our knees. Soil is complex, it is alive, and it is grace.
Winter radishes
We are in trouble, partly because of a virus too new for us to handle, mostly because we’ve forgotten we come from the garden. The story of Adam and Eve (and it is, of course, an old story, told by humans about humans) is a cautionary tale for our times.
We fool ourselves into thinking we can control the garden–our “economy” is based on consumption, on lifeless dirt fertilized with synthetic chemicals produced in a furnace in a process invented by the same man who developed chlorine gas for warfare.
Heaven is found not in the empty sky but in the teeming loam under our feet. If we remembered where we come from, we would not be dumping milk down the drain and crushing tons of beans for mulch as suddenly destitute families face hunger and empty shelves.
November tomato from the garden
A couple of days ago the peas I dropped into the holes my fingers poked into the ground (I did nothing more than that) broke through the earth. The leaves are headed heavenward, but so are the roots. The earth, the air, the rain, and the light will coalesce to form more peas.
I can eat the peas, I can sell them, I can let them fall to waste, but what I cannot do is make them. I pray a lot in the garden, sometimes out of desperation on a bad day, but in recognition of grace on the good days.
