Into the Blue: Treasure
Treasure
If I list the acts I am most proud of, and which bring me the greatest joy, raising Pip and Phoebe would certainly be at the top, but right below: gardening.
Every November, I sit on the ground between my leaf-covered garden beds, legs straight out, with a basket of last summer's remaining garlic at my side. As I carefully separate the heads into their multiple parts, the outer peels gather around me, sticking to my fingers and pants. The process takes about twenty minutes, and as I work, I wonder why it took me so long--why do I always wait for the threat of frost to stop my ridiculous game of procrastination. I gather the separated cloves into a pile, running my fingers through the fallen peels to make sure I haven't missed any. I pouch the cloves in the bottom of my sweater, and one by one, press them down into the garden dirt, points up. I talk to them too as I imagine their relief in being placed right where they are meant to be: "Rest up," I say, "I'll be watching you, waiting for your green tips to signal spring is near. Until then, thank you."
This year while planting the cloves, my fingers find a buried potato. Her skin and flesh are healthy despite not being attached to a root system all the months since June's harvest. "I must of missed you," I say out loud. And then, I find another potato, and another, and another, all of them small, healthy, and uniquely shaped. With each discovery, I am a little more giddy. I find just enough for a single serving, and decide to supplement our roasted brussels sprouts that night with the unexpected finds.
When I was young--when my memories are more blurry--we often visited my grandparents at their farm in Westport. They sold the farm before I turned six, but the memories remain: a flock of sheep; a beautiful sunset; my grandfather in a plaid jacket with a pipe; my grandmother in a kitchen with a hanging rotary phone; stuffed birds behind arced glass hung in the dining room; two dogs named Sarge and Roy. And I remember treasure buried in the mud out back. My cousin and I, shovels and buckets in hand, would bundle up and head out to excavate brooches, necklaces, rings --intricate gold pieces with rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Each visit, our discoveries were more rare, but that never curbed our hunting. To do this day, I have no explanation as to how the buried costume jewelry landed in my grandparents' back field, but my younger self would have assured you it was pirates.
Somehow planting spuds in April and digging up full-grown potatoes months later is as thrilling (if not more) as discovering pirate treasure. Harvesting potatoes may be my most favorite activity to do with a child: showing their eager hands how to gently rake through the early summer dirt, watching their curious mind motivate their search with no need to understand what they're looking for, and witnessing their first discovery, the moment their curiosity transforms to surprise to joy. With each find, neither child nor I can help but feel in awe of the potatoes that keep manifesting in our hands; we are exhilarated to find these full-grown treasures in our backyard.
In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about an epiphany she had while picking beans:
"I looked around at the garden and could feel her delight in giving us these beautiful raspberries, squash, basil, potatoes, asparagus, lettuce, kale and beets, broccoli, peppers, brussels sprouts, carrots, dill, onions, leeks, spinach. It reminded me of my little girls' answer to 'How much do I love you?' 'Thiiiiiiiis much,' with arms stretched wide, they replied. This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden--so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.
The epiphany in the beans. I spend a lot of time thinking about our relationships with the land, how we are given so much and what we might give back. I try to work through the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems. All in my head. But suddenly there was no intellectualizing, no rationalizing, just the pure sensation of baskets full of mother love. The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return." (p.122)
Kimmerer's epiphany brings me back to the early months of our son's life when he needed an MRI to rule out hydrocephalus: Roo promised so long as we can love Pip, and he can love us back, we will be OK. Roo's wise reminder became my mantra during that very difficult time. To be alive is to engage in reciprocal relationships of love. Nothing else really matters, does it? In her poem, Passenger, Mary Oliver reminds us it is our most important work:
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
I have come to understand strawberries as the ultimate treasures, way more precious than any ruby. The red berries appear in mid-June in our garden, and every year, the birds and other critters leave just enough berries for me to make a cake for Pip's birthday on June 15. I finally stopped fretting over the half-eaten berries when Kimmerer reminded me they are gifts for all of us, not just some of us:
"Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you can not earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery--as with random act of kindness, we do not know their source." (p.24)
Not long after I read Kimmerer's essay, a friend planted wild strawberries in our front yard. She brought the tender plants from her father's land in upstate New York, I imagine not far from the field Kimmerer talks about in her own childhood. The plants started out as few and far between, small, vulnerable, and barely noticeable. I doubted they would survive. How wrong I was. Today, the wild plants cover the entire grounds of our front gardens, spilling over the edges. They are abundant, happy, and thriving. My friend now comes to our house to transplant wild strawberries from our garden to other gardens nearby.
Like so many of us, in recent years, I have struggled to process the state of our world--the daily realities of unnecessary loss across all forms of life: human, animal, and plant. The grief that comes with our understanding the magnitude of what we are losing on a daily basis is unbearable. Our Earth remains unconditional in her love, and yet we remain stuck in our destructive ways, blinded by fear--whether one is inclined to fight, freeze or flee, it is our collective fear that gets in the way of us turning this ship around. My antidotes to my own fear, thanks to many great minds before me:
Pay attention to how the Earth loves me;
Lean into my work of loving the world;
Give the gifts I have to give;
Receive the gifts that come to me;
Remember, I am as wild as strawberries.
As always,
thank you for reading.