Greenblade

It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve. The mood in Buffalo Street Books was cheerful and quiet. I browsed novels and non-fiction, cookbooks and writing. I picked up a book on making macarons, a Peter Tremayne mystery, and a box of cards for thank you notes. And then, in the little aisle between “environment” and “gardening” I had a mystical experience.

I wish I could predict these things, order them up, but you take what you can get. I was looking for a particular title that was scribbled on a scrap of paper and this meant I read each of the titles along the shelf. Most of them were dire: this species gone, that place defiled, humanity on the brink.

I turned around and there were entirely different books – gardening, farm to table, edible landscapes. I found a handbook on home-scale permaculture and right there I felt the difference between the appeal to fear and the appeal to the desire to grow things.

Fear is such a strange motivator. First, it works. It touches our most primal instinct – the instinct to survive physically and to preserve the integrity of the primal social group, whatever that is seen to be. (Think of the justifications for war as the defense of “our way of life.”) But fear is also volatile. It produces random and sometimes ludicrous actions because it interferes with cognitive processes. It interferes with thought and it interferes with faith.

A little fear is not a bad thing. To be afraid of a genuine danger proves that we are alive and aware and not a garden ornament. Books about the dangers are not bad things either. Being informed beats much of the public discussion taking place in online comments and talk shows. But in my mystical moment I literally turned away from one approach and toward another.

So my New Year’s resolution is this: I have a small fenced garden with raised beds. This past year I got some tomatoes, kale, swiss chard, basil, a few ears of corn and one pumpkin. For years I have joked that it was a good thing my family did not have to depend upon my gardening skills for survival but this year I have decided that isn’t funny. I have a bit of land and so I am its custodian. I now have a good base of native plants but the vegetable garden is the site of largely unrealized potential. So my project for this year is to learn intensive gardening. I will be doing this so as to produce more food, of course, but my spiritual goal is to learn how to be a steward of my tiny piece of this planet.

Postscript: I Googled “intensive gardening” just to get an idea what was ahead of me and the article I found recommended … the very book on homescale permaculture that triggered my mystical experience.