A few green shoots

It's amazing how healing nature is. Yesterday an e-mail popped into my box with a video showing how to use a new gardening tool that could help immensely with growing from seed, and immediately my thoughts jumped to last spring.

I had put in a raw, never-been-used raised garden in the front yard the previous fall and as a garden newbie, I was eager to do everything right when it came to planting. I ordered heirloom seeds, studied how to grow them, made planting pots from newspaper, spent hours and hours designing the garden layout in a graphics program, and learned all about four season gardening and root cellaring (I was very hopeful). Reality intervened later in the form of spindly seedlings and aphids, but as plants really did grow from those insignificant seeds I was thrilled every time and when I actually harvested--what a wonderful thing! I harvested!--I knew I was witnessing a miracle.

When I ordered that new garden tool yesterday I was inspired to transfer all my planting information from last year's calendar onto this year's, and suddenly the winter mentality I'd been living in ended and a healing took place--just from the thought of participating in that intimate, fundamental, life-affirming dance again.

And life-affirming it is. By committing myself to planting my own food, I am committing myself to live another year in spite of all the problems and difficulties I and this nation are facing, problems that could disable me with their terrifying, horrendous magnitude. Planting places me on the side of life as our nation and culture continue their wild downward slide and, on the other side when our usual way of life is gone, begin the slow upward swing of renewal.

Even planning to plan for that day of renewal is healing. Gathered seeds await.