Garden Head

For someone interested in biology, I am surprisingly separated from the natural world. If you've been paying attention (not that there's any obligation) many posts will deal with urban soups, city lights, stories about subways and streetcars and alleys and bars and basements. It's sad to say, but the modern city, for all its rhapsodic and contradictory glory, is unsustainable. It will be here for the blink of an evolutionary eye and it will either be eaten by choking vines or distribute itself back into the ecosystem. Both options are on the table. They are not of equal probability, sadly.

I've recenly begun to take baby steps toward implementing all my talk into some sort of action. So I joined a gardening group for two reasons: to learn something about specific plants, and as insurance policy against starving to death in the event of violent collapse. I've only bene to one meeting, but I heard enough there to inspire me. It seems trite to say that gardening is a way of life, but it is a culture that embodies my values in a microcosm. There are people who keep seeds and maintain their lineages through the generations, people who are all about biodiversity, Native shamans whose culture complements our godless efforts, egalitarian utiltarians who just want to get some food out of fallow fields of a sprawling Canadian city, people who maintain strange personal Edens (as much as I hate to use the word). The parade of characters goes on.

So, will this help me tap into life? Into the force that animates? Into the cycles of the seasons? Into the ceremonies of a people concerned with a spirit world which is actual and all about us? Into reclaiming my own spirit which was meek and indecisive and dependent? Suddenly I don't sound so pessimistic. But such are initial bursts of enthusiasm.

Consider: "Many people's eyes glaze over when they see a complicated mathematical expression. Other people find this ridiculous. But I find it at least as elegant as a mandala. Not as elegant as math, but so it goes."