though it is lovely to be in a house in a neighborhood in a city, courtney and i long for a garden.
i began digging up a section of the boys' backyard and intend to plant there before we leave, but it isn't the same.
this contrast in lifestyles (waking up at 5 am and working yourself towards delicious exhaustion or waking up at 8:30 am and frolicking all day, hardly knowing what time you'll fall asleep) has revealed a great deal to me about the balance i aim to maintain in my life once the pieces come back together in something resembling orderly fashion.
what we daydream about is having a thriving organic vegetable farm with fruit trees, bread-baking facilities, chickens, and goats. we want all our friends to live there with us. we want to build things with our own hands and cultivate a creative space.
when i am in the dirt, weeding or planting or harvesting, there is a sense of infinite possibility grounded in something real and tangible.
even now, just writing about this inspiration for a very concentric, interconnected community-based homestead, i feel the urge to put on my boots and gardening gloves and finish digging up that patch of grass.
when i began working on the farm in wyoming, i had written small snippets of nothing-much. my literary energy felt sapped. i was constantly required to be in the moment, so there wasn't enough distance between myself and my experience to process it as a story.
but the conversations i had in wyoming, and conversations since then, have summoned up a desire to document. somehow that distance was there, though it would certainly not be described as detachment - rather, it was something like the buddhist concept of nonattachment.
it might have had something to do with this aforementioned feeling of expansion and concentration i have while gardening. i would find myself this state where i could see a thought arise and watch it pass by, without scrambling to dissect it.
one day i told courtney, i had the most amazing thing happen to me while i was gardening. i suddenly thought, i am nothing. all that there is is this small piece of earth that i am digging up and i am so small and nothing.
she had this look on her face, the lopsided grin, and she said, i'm sorry, i'm just in the kind of mood where i have to laugh at you.
i laughed with her. after being in school for four years and overthinking the most basic decisions and events of everyday life, after learning to believe that my every action has tremendous ripple effects and political implications, it's difficult to detach myself from that method of operation, if only for a moment. but something about the experience felt more stark and solid than previous pseudo-intellectual ones.
i suppose this brings me back to how i felt in that split second. and speaking of political implications, the practice of sustainable organic farming is chock full of them.
but my point being, what i miss about gardening everyday (and the reason why i want to build a life that centers around it) is that openness of mind, the way i can think about books and writing and music and friends and family and yoga and love and anger and the body and food and death and language, and then all of that din will become a dull murmur and then silence sets in, and once again it is just my hands (still weak) and the seeds or the roots or the flower, and it is nothing and it is everything at once.
i began digging up a section of the boys' backyard and intend to plant there before we leave, but it isn't the same.
this contrast in lifestyles (waking up at 5 am and working yourself towards delicious exhaustion or waking up at 8:30 am and frolicking all day, hardly knowing what time you'll fall asleep) has revealed a great deal to me about the balance i aim to maintain in my life once the pieces come back together in something resembling orderly fashion.
what we daydream about is having a thriving organic vegetable farm with fruit trees, bread-baking facilities, chickens, and goats. we want all our friends to live there with us. we want to build things with our own hands and cultivate a creative space.
when i am in the dirt, weeding or planting or harvesting, there is a sense of infinite possibility grounded in something real and tangible.
even now, just writing about this inspiration for a very concentric, interconnected community-based homestead, i feel the urge to put on my boots and gardening gloves and finish digging up that patch of grass.
when i began working on the farm in wyoming, i had written small snippets of nothing-much. my literary energy felt sapped. i was constantly required to be in the moment, so there wasn't enough distance between myself and my experience to process it as a story.
but the conversations i had in wyoming, and conversations since then, have summoned up a desire to document. somehow that distance was there, though it would certainly not be described as detachment - rather, it was something like the buddhist concept of nonattachment.
it might have had something to do with this aforementioned feeling of expansion and concentration i have while gardening. i would find myself this state where i could see a thought arise and watch it pass by, without scrambling to dissect it.
one day i told courtney, i had the most amazing thing happen to me while i was gardening. i suddenly thought, i am nothing. all that there is is this small piece of earth that i am digging up and i am so small and nothing.
she had this look on her face, the lopsided grin, and she said, i'm sorry, i'm just in the kind of mood where i have to laugh at you.
i laughed with her. after being in school for four years and overthinking the most basic decisions and events of everyday life, after learning to believe that my every action has tremendous ripple effects and political implications, it's difficult to detach myself from that method of operation, if only for a moment. but something about the experience felt more stark and solid than previous pseudo-intellectual ones.
i suppose this brings me back to how i felt in that split second. and speaking of political implications, the practice of sustainable organic farming is chock full of them.
but my point being, what i miss about gardening everyday (and the reason why i want to build a life that centers around it) is that openness of mind, the way i can think about books and writing and music and friends and family and yoga and love and anger and the body and food and death and language, and then all of that din will become a dull murmur and then silence sets in, and once again it is just my hands (still weak) and the seeds or the roots or the flower, and it is nothing and it is everything at once.
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