Ever since I can remember, I have loved one thing and that is any activity outdoors. Again shocking I'm sure, but I wasn't always this put together! (haha) Growing up, I more often was found at the barn or lake than a country club, more often sliding in white softball pants than putting on a dress, and more often resembled a dirt dauber more than a girl scout. In fact, to some old friends, my name was even, "Dale the Dirt Dauber."
I may not have realized it, but I have been involved with gardening all my life. My best example has always been my dad who has gardened since he was in college at Birmingham-Southern. My brother-in-law has also had a passion for gardening through serving on the board for Jones Valley Urban Farm.
My actual first memory of gardening was working with my mom in our garden. Immediately I became entrenched with the task of removing every rock from the soil. However, being an optimist from the beginning, I considered each one of these rocks to be diamonds. So imagine me, slowly and in amazement looking at each rock, somewhat marbled, and with different patterns, and pronouncing with the exactness of a geologist, "diamond!"
Fun game, but even more intriguing was when I came to teach in the small pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico, I discovered that the Zuni tribe survived through gardening. While neighboring tribes attacked and took what they needed, the Zunis were a tribe that stayed in their sacred land and developed waffle gardens in the desert. As the term conveys, they actually took the soil and around the plant created with the soil a container for water. Multiply these a few times, and you understand the origin of the term, "waffle gardening." Through many years, all the members of the village had gardens along the river which flowed through the small pueblo that still thrives. Check them out at, http://www.ashiwi.org/
Today I still garden whenever I can, with my family, with volunteers and with friends. Through being a member of Catalyst for Birmingham, I continue to work in the North 32nd Community Garden in Norwood, in the Outstanding Urban Renewal Garden in West End, the Southern Environmental Center's Ecoscapes, and in an upcoming school garden for the community of Tarrant.
What I have found through any project is that gardens, however you define them, bring people together, make most people feel better, and create miracles wherever they are.
For example, as I was planting pansies around my mailbox, my neighbor who I have never seen other than in his car, leaving or coming back home, walked across the street to ask me about what I was doing. He delightfully informed me that he had grown up on a farm. He told me all the kinds of plants he grew including beans which reminded me of the beanfield in Thoreau's Walden. And, for once, I found, with the upcoming pressures of the holidays looming, what Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance, what Thoreau wrote in Walden, and what Epcitetus wrote in The Enchiridion, satisfaction with where I was and what I could control. At the end of the first conversation with my neighbor of three years, a garden tip, he shared with me was, "Lick your fingers when you are finished." Now to many, this might not sound like the best or most sanitary advice, however to me, it was perfect.
Life is good, but it is also dirty! What we make of life together, that is where a true garden lies. In a somewhat Proustian rememberance, I began to realize that things are not always as they seem. The distance in my neighbor who has a large sticker across the back of his car which reads, "In God We Trust" and my wrecked "No" with a BP logo are not that far apart, nor are many of the limits or divisions we may think exist. And, as the friend in Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" realized, I also realized that "'things as they are,'-her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone-'"just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes." While I'm not sure all of us would agree what "Him" or in this story the Lord actually entails, I do know that like the movie City Slickers says, it's finding one thing and in this case it's finding what fulfills you. It's finding passion. (And I believe, I've gone on enough to you in class that it's not all about what comes to your heads first :) Real talk, It's what fills your circle, which on this day for me was dirt, a circle of pansies, and conversation. esperanza para las flores
