The Beautiful Weight of Growing Things
A Garden, A Chat with Sophie Strand, and the Big Question: WWMMD?
“I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”
That’s how I described the spring day my husband and I spent digging up part of the lawn to put in our new raised bed garden.
It was only 8’x 8’. As any seasoned gardener–or ditch digger–will know, that is at once minuscule and enormous.
In May, I lamented that we could plant so little. By September, I regretted that we’d planted too much. The great jungle has given forth a zillion green tomatoes, more parsley than any fine dining establishment could use in a month, and lots of cute, stumpy carrots that didn’t have enough light due to the great profusion of basil.
When we moved here fifteen years ago, we named our not-quite two acres of land “The Burren.” You may know that magical moonscape that stretches between Galway and Clare. Our land looks quite green thanks to the grass seed the builder scattered around our home, but a scrim of dirt barely covers a ledge of sandstone. It took dynamite to clear space for our foundation and I needed a pickaxe to plant my first daffodil bulbs.
And so, leveling the ground to put in raised garden beds took a crowbar.
The handle of that same pickaxe I’d used as a much younger woman had shattered in the first hour of excavation. We grunted and swore, kept trading shovels depending on whose back hurt most at any given moment.
That evening, cold bottles of beer held in loose, weak fingers, we named the garden “Obair,” the Irish for work.
And then, the growing season happened.
A wise friend helped us plan our garden, square foot by square foot. A neighbor with a pickup helped me cart in the compost. We took an adventure to the magical plant lady in a lush valley that offered the opposite of a commercial nursery experience and bought a few more seedlings than we could handle.
The wait began. We worried a bit about how much sun the garden actually got as the summer leaves filled in.
The kids and I traveled a lot over the summer, so we missed celery and broccoli season. My husband would call from the backyard, seeking direction. I reminded him that planting the vegetables gave me zero information about harvesting them. I think I offered “follow your instincts and try not to let things go to waste.” (This… was not helpful.)
By the time we got home, the beetles had devoured the kale (luckily I had another crop in a protected VegePod that another friend passed on), and the flowers that were meant to deter pests had overtaken a great deal of the space the edible plants might have needed.
Yesterday was probably (hopefully?) the last hot day of 2023. I stood on the porch looking down at the riot of green (and occasional flash of red of a rotten tomato) that fills the massive cage that is The Garden Obair. I couldn’t gather the energy to do the last bit of work that had to be done.
There’s a part of me that feels proud of this cedar skeleton we built atop a rocky hill that no sane people would try to cultivate.
But, there are still lettuces to harvest and move to new, cold resistant quarters and there are still more damn green tomatoes to salvage. To look at it all just makes me feel… tired.
Oh, the weight of being worthy of these growing things we asked to sustain us over one precious, fleeting season.
The Question: What Would Mary Magdalene Do?
This week,
comes to KnotWork Storytelling and takes us into the landscape, ecology, and culture of her novel, The Madonna Secret.Anyone who knows me knows that I am always up for a Mary Magdalene novel, and Sophie’s is exquisite.
In this episode, Sophie describes the lands we know from the New Testaments as lush and verdant, full of flowers and leopards and any number of wonders that seem impossible in the modern desert we associate with that pocket of the world.
Miriam is at home amongst the herbs and the rich soil that sustains her community, both corporeally and spiritually. Her way of being stands in such stark contrast to what would follow: the ways of the religious behemoth founded in her beloved’s name (but not rooted in her beloved’s true essence or message).
In our conversation, Sophie speaks eloquently of the empire that would so profoundly disrupt Miriam and Yeshua’s organic, soul-penetrating connection to the earth and all her beings.
From 2,000 Years Ago in Palestine to Yesterday in the Hudson Valley
When I look out our own mad, lush garden, I don’t feel guilt. Not exactly. That feeling seems tied up with the patriarchal distortion of Christianity that made Catholic Guilt™ a thing.
I feel something deeper and older. I mourn the profound, embodied, habitual sense of separation that makes it easier to stay out of the wet grass on a cool autumn morning and choose to eat something out of the fridge.
Child of the empire, I consider how my coffee would get cold if I have to go out there and poke around in the dirt to add homegrown veggies to my store bought eggs.
This is all a little silly, and I know need to shake up my routine and just get out there and gather me basil leaves while I may, but it’s just one more reminder of the long, long legacy of alienation from our more-than-human world isn’t just an American problem or Cartesian residue or a result of the industrial revolution.
This divorce from the elements has been unfolding over two millennia of history. It has been a long, long time, and yet it’s a negligible moment in life of this earth.
There’s medicine for this, of course. The Madonna Secret and all of Sophie’s radical invitations to get tangled in the ecology that exists outside the door are a perfect place to start.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think there’s a tiny bit of chard to snag for lunch before the first frost settles in
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The Knotwork episodes I want to listen to are piling up! Thank you for your work.
Can’t wait to listen. I love your work Marisa. Ever since I met you at Feast Day. Last year? The year before? Im not sure!
And I can so relate to your garden story. Mine is more wild than cultivated now.