Food and Ignorance: Tangled Up In Hues (of Perspective)

Gardening is a habit I picked up when my kids were teenagers, and I don’t see myself wanting to kick it any time soon. What started with growing a few pots of herbs for cooking on the front porch, has become a highly celebrated feature of the home and garden we get to cultivate now. This journey in personal and physical growth has given me the confidence to challenge myself into the unknown every single day. This is partly because I enjoy watching the evolution of each plant’s life cycle, but mostly because it feels good in my soul to see the ongoing pattern of how the things we nurture will naturally take on their own shape and form, beyond what we intended for them. Nature’s patterns.

It’s similar to watching children grow up, minus the pain of letting them go once they’ve reached some level of maturity. It feels more like a wistful memory than a deep yearning for what used to be, which probably roots back to some version of us:

(1) missing who we used to be at that time, and/or (2) wishing we had another chance at it. While it is definitely human nature to reflect on the past, doing so with regret, shame and blame is more of a learned, patterned response.

 Left untended, those moments can and will stunt our growth instantly. Every time our oxygen intake suffers, our bodies take those hits so our brains can move forward. If we pile a bunch of those incidents on top of each other, they will eventually become a medical condition of some sort. Has anyone noticed the recent trend of resetting the vagus nerve? (as far as I can tell, the best antidote here is a lot of uncontrollable laughter).

Collectively, our nervous systems are on the brink because we have gotten so used to limited breathing. Between Covid and the political divide, holding our breath has become a typical response to all kinds of fears. Lucky for us, we have tools to untangle these trigger points and forge a new pattern of response that feels more balanced and whole. This universal toolkit serves to support us, with the stark awareness that we can’t change the course of the events that have happened to us, around us, and within us.

From this perspective, I become more aware of the perfect timing our universe provides for our continued growth. I can see the bridge of love between parenting and gardening that made it easier for me to let go of the daily, hands-on nurturing I had been doing to help my kids grow up for 25 years. Writing about this now, it seems so obvious, but this is the first time I’ve made that correlation consciously. It is quite clear that gardening gave me an inviting arena for my habituated instinct to parent. 

Now, as I help my current plants grow every day, I am enjoying the spontaneity of being on call whenever my kids need me. (Last night, it was a wasp/hornet incident that was more involved than it sounds). This gives me the ability to honor the emotional and spiritual support my garden has provided for me as my children have become bonafide, self-sufficient adults, who don’t need my daily input anymore. Now, they ask for it when they want it. As I look across this new landscape, I can see natural beauty flowing in all directions – and traveling far beyond what I (or We) are able to see!

My latent interest in gardening roots back to my childhood. I can still remember waking up to go outside and see the blue morning glories that grew up our house, just outside the back door. In the first seven years of my life, we grew things in our yard that we could eat (sample might be a better word choice here?!). It wasn’t a bountiful garden, but for me, it provided the structure of sustenance that nurtured my mind about food and foliage, even though it didn’t supply nutrition. It tethered me to the process, no doubt, but it would be years before those connections were unearthed again. Over time, they have become an intentional, daily practice in my life that offers an array of emotional samples over time.

 Until I was about seven or eight, our family garden sat at the bottom of the hill in our backyard, behind three trees that sat on the crest (2 apple, 1 pecan). I remember someone saying “they are fruit trees, but they aren’t very fruitful”, and the concept stuck with me: that we could be a thing without acting like that thing, and vice versa. I remember cleaning the garden crops in our plastic swimming pool – a concept that didn’t seem gross at all back then. Side note: I don’t think germs got much consideration in my family. In fact, I have a few nasty stories that pretty much confirms it. 

Antidotes, on the other hand, were far more interesting at our house, so that type of information flowed freely. It was my mother who first taught me that every ‘harmful’ plant (like stinging nettles) has a companion plant growing somewhere close to it (like jewelweed) that will temper the ill effects. I remember being shocked when my friends' houses didn’t have an aloe vera plant designated for treating cuts, scrapes and sunburns at the ready. I believe it was one of my first serious lessons in ignorance: ‘care’ is relative.

Back then, I fancied myself a farmer, but upon further reflection, I was more of a garden pest. I pulled most of the carrots from the ground before they had barely grown and then stuffed them back in the holes before my mother saw what I had done. They didn’t stand any real chance because I had broken their fragile roots as they were forming. I learned that it was much harder to repair that damage than it was to have patience while nurturing them. I also “accidentally” stepped on the asparagus because I didn’t like the bitter, “woody” taste, but since it was growing wild, I’m not sure it was primed to be food in the first place. Asparagus rarely tastes that way to me now, so maybe we were just sampling volunteers? I haven’t tried growing it here yet, but after that memory came up, it’s going into the plan for next year! 

Life cycles keep time in ways that our clocks and calendars cannot. They give us estimated guidelines, with no lasting guarantees about endings. There are assumptions and promises we make in that space, and we do our level best to keep them, but life and time are qualifiers that have no measurably defined boundaries. Period. Left untended, most things will grow outside the confines of their borders to search for food and establish growth – even when their care and consideration has been neglected. I have watched ‘dead’ plants that I thought wouldn’t survive come back and thrive, and I have watched perfectly healthy plants wither and die without warning. As humans, our belief systems keep us from fully accepting that timing.

Last week (during Food Week), my mother asked me to come help her with some yard work. She moved to California a couple months ago, but still owns a home in Kansas City. I showed up that morning, thinking we were going to be pulling weeds and doing general fall clean up. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wouldn’t be here to tend her garden in the spring, so she had a different idea. Suddenly, I was facing an emotional re-ordering and renewal that I didn’t think I was ready for, but I was. 

She laid out a plan to level the beautiful garden that she had worked so hard to build, and my brain struggled to take it in.I have watched her joy and excitement about this particular garden come to life every season, and I wasn’t prepared to tear it down immediately, even though I understood her reasoning. I kept breathing deeply the whole time, which made it easy to allow her wishes. If she had any regrets, she didn’t mention them (she usually doesn’t). Her process was methodical, and I did my best to keep up with her all day.

Maybe my emotional attachment dragged my energy down, but after six hours of hard labor (pulling strongly-rooted weeds and moving rocks), my muscles were spent. My 77 year old mother, however,  kept going for several more hours until the transformation was complete. I can’t explain this phenomenon from a mental or physical standpoint because it seems impossible. Emotionally and spiritually, however, she found the resources she needed, as she is prone to do. I don’t know why I question her magic (in the garden and otherwise), because she has consistently defied the odds before her in ways that teach me to push my own belief system further than I think it can go every single day. It’s just what she does.

The past 12 months have been especially enlightening for me, emotionally. I have experienced the effects of loss at many different levels, and it’s made me more reflective, overall. As I teach people to think about Food and Ignorance, I stand in the face of my own personal ‘lack’ and all of the things that I don’t know about the world and how it really works. There are few things I claim to know for sure, but I will say this: I am fully confident that I will always be learning from my environment, and my perspectives will continue to shift and grow with each passing season, as they always have. 

As far as I am concerned, comparing what we know now to what we knew then (with contextual awareness and additional information) is among the most creative and interesting things that we can do with our minds. Philosophically, I might argue that it’s the reason why we exist to begin with, but then again, I can easily be persuaded to something else. Last week, in the span of eight hours, I moved from being sad to see this garden go, to knowing there is more to grow.

Second side note: as I finished the last sentence, my Mother texted me. She said her pole beans are already vining in her brand new garden. She’s in a completely different climate, but she’s excited to learn its life cycles and watch her roots expanding from one garden to another…