Abundance
“I knew
it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The
land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with
roasting ears and blackberries and bird songs. By a shower of gifts
and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to
provide for ourselves. That's what good mother's do.”
Robin Wall
Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass, p.122)
I planted a small patch
of greens last weekend—lettuces and mustard greens. I planted them
in a small terracotta planter with soil from the compost pile and set
it up on a milk crate beside my screen-porch. Such is the challenge of
growing one's own food in an urban neighborhood in the deep South.
Last year I planted Swiss chard in one of my flower beds, and the
next morning there were only quarter-inch stubs sticking out of the
dirt. Bunnies. You wouldn't think there would be bunnies in the city,
but there are—and they like chard. So do slugs, and chipmunks.
I love this image of the
land, the Mother Earth, loving us back with her abundance. These days
the farmers markets are flooded with folks looking for local and
organic. The one nearest me is a yuppy paradise—everyone with their
designer dogs and multi-child, big wheeled strollers, sporting
beach-tans, and wearing floppy hats and black sunglasses the size of
Tennessee. Not your grandmother's farmer's market, for sure. The
markets of my childhood featured flat wooden trays of vegetables with
dirt still clinging to them. Big leaves of collard greens and
pumpkins this time of year. Sometimes, a few boxes of scuppernong or
muscadine grapes, and, if the first frost had already come, ripe
persimmons. You grabbed a paper sack, filled it up and took it inside
where a wood stove was already burning. A guy in overalls stood
behind a counter stacked with shotgun shells and fishing tackle and
checked you out with a calculator.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “It came to me while picking
beans, the secret of happiness.” Connection and contentment.
They may be found in a garden. Children who go through their young
years being allowed to connect with the earth in this way will grow
up to be adults who appreciate the source of their food—the love of
the Mother. There are so many opportunities for encouraging this in
children, not just in a garden, but on a seashore—collecting shells
to take home sandy and place lovingly in a bedroom window. In the
middle of winter, you can listen to the ocean in them, and smell the
tides. Gathering “special” rocks for saving as though they are
precious jewels. My son, Jake, liked to pull his red wagon around the
neighborhood and collect everything from acorns and hickory nuts, to
seedpods, pine cones and flower tops. By the time he finished, he had
created a work of art framed by the metal sides of his Red Flyer. The
Mother nurtures the souls of children with more than Sunday School
and Bible verses. She loves them with her abundance.
Next time you enjoy a
fresh arugula salad with pears and pecans, remember that all that
deliciousness is the Mother's way of loving you back.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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