A lot of changes in the past two years, and some constants. I've come back around to the same points on different planes of the spiral once or thrice. The peach seedling gifted to me about five years ago is bearing its second batch of fruit in my front yard. The loquat seed gifted to me a year ago is now a foot high seedling, same size as the peach was when it came to me. My home garden has grown from a few beds to about 15, and the sunflowers and zinnias and tatsoi come up at will throughout. For the first time in the last seven years, my home garden is my only garden, and I am finding the need to answer to this question: who am I outside of a community garden? I have left the comfortable nest of engaging, salaried jobs and have had some time to retreat and withdraw, reconsider and reframe. And now it's time to relaunch. I used to move at least once a year, and now that I've been settled in the same place, and intend to stay here for the foreseeable future, my work has begun to shift. A change in perspective from running programs to beginning to look at the systems in which they (we) exist. The things that I notice about the role of nature in urban places remain the same. The capacity for a school or community garden to provide the setting to experience sparks of wonder at nature's intricacies, sparks that generate curiosity, love, awe, and a sense of magic. The energy these sparks unleash that drives people to tend a garden and eat from it, to plant a flower, to turn compost, to tilt smiling toward the rain.
But now I'm looking at learning a new role, moving beyond being a shepherd of immediate experience to a facilitator for translating the experience into meaning and eventually action toward a sustainable future. There, I said it. Sustainable. Which begs the question, what do we have that is worth sustaining? Don't think too hard on that, because the more important question is this: What is the future we want to create? Like it or not, from each thought to each rote action, everything we do has a consequence. So what would it look like to be intentional toward specific consequences? And what if we could have some basic agreement on those consequences? More clean air and water. More topsoil. More diversity, everywhere. More gardens, more Wild. More love. More harmony and joy. Those are some of the qualities I would like to sustain through my actions and choices. Those are the building blocks for some concrete future.
So from this little nest to....there. Time to test the wings.
