Why I garden
Watching your youth leave your body is like watching a Galveston Shrimper sail off to the horizon and noticing the net tower disappears last. Time, distance and a steady gaze makes us realize all journeys bend away before they vanish and that straight paths are the illusions of order. Euclidean geometry might work great on paper but in the real world gravity builds spheres so everything can come back around. All mortals follow an arc of beginning, peak and end. That pause of reflection is the application of that calculator of a brain of yours gauging your own place, speed and trajectory. Keep in mind of course Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle during this exercise; to know its path is not to know its speed, it know its speed is not to know its path. An examined life is worth living according to quantum physics, mere observation changes the path. Occasional tweaks are made to the flight path but to guess its peak is to know of your destiny, your perigee is more likely (and should be) a posthumous summary. Motivation enough to keep reaching.
Regardless of your journey’s geometry its distance should age your knowledge into a little wisdom. I can’t claim to be wise but I can claim to be over fifty thus just a little past halfway in a (God willing) long arc. To quote Bonnie Raitt, life gets mighty precious when there is less of it to take. While my priority is a promise to myself to get on with it in regard to my writing (mortality finishes all manuscripts) my preferences these days are rather simple. I only want to build things, learn things or love things. I’m the happiest when it involves all three.
Like growing things. But there are other reasons I like to garden.
The best estimate from the National Geographic Genome project is that our species stretches back approximately 160,000 years to Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley. Figuring five generations every 100 years that works out to about 8,000 churns (a little more than 300 with a written language but only one with a smart phone). Using the Population Reference Bureau number, the sum of “our people” works out to just over one hundred billion, easily a soul for every star in our galaxy. All souls require a biological wrapping; as Plato put it we need two legs to walk our brain around. The primary building material of this wrapping is recycled carbon. Which is to say the sum of our past success lay in the dirt...literally. Yet staring at dirt is like staring at the stars in the night sky; we can only see dimly what has already been made. Calculating that arc backwards requires a slew of bright minds yet it is the reading of a dim light. The future may be unknown but it is certainly brighter.
Which is another reason I started growing things, because the soil is dark with the past but sunlight blinding with future. When I work the dirt I find my hands and thoughts straddling somewhere in between.
A geologist once told me the average depth of soil is only about 6”. From this thin layer humanity grew from tribe to urban center (half of us live in cities now). We, as a species, had to domestic our food in order to grow wild with our ideas. A platoon of hunters and gathers were replaced by two (a shepherd and a farmer). This evolution of food production didn’t put 90% of those in the Fertile Crescent out of a job, it gave them the opportunity to find one. Think of it as creative destruction Copper Age style. This system of food production and delivery has distilled to currently a mere 1% of the U.S. population needed to feed us all (the entire U.S. military commands almost the exact same percentage, we have specialized ourselves to a draw in plowshares vs. swords). And while 99% of people can now think of other things to do other than farm there is the risk that they don’t think at all about their food and where it comes from.
Which is another reason I grow things. I want to remember that what we eat is a ground-up operation and that for 99.8% of the generations before mine finding some was a day-to-day operation. Gathering runs deep in our blood; these days most of it is done with a shopping cart wearing comfortable shoes. We should all get our hands dirty now and then.
The horizon bends away, the world turns I shall dig my hands into the earth and anchor to it, hope that the soil that expanded this species will offer me at least some solace from it. We didn't start the fire. Starting with the first algae, it took three billion years of mortality and weathering rock to grace us soil. The stuff is hard earned and from it civilization borne. I have taken a reading of my own trajectory and decided to dig. Though I just scratch the surface its deep enough to place two strands of twisted DNA asleep in a seed. Something not quite living but certainly carrying the plans on how to do that.
Why do I grow things? I like to see what unfurls. Such is the history of our people.
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