Fall Harvest Moon
A full day with the garden, spreading fertilizer, working it into the soil, mulching the beds. Also pulled out the tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers while Kate removed the cucumbers, hot peppers and marigolds. The compost pile looks colorful.
As I worked, I wondered about the significance of our garden for our lives, for the questions around reimagining faith. At one level it feels like aesthetic statement. A claim about the beauty of productive land and its products. At another it embodies our relationship as a joint work, a family project that yields food and time together. Going against the grain of the modern emphasis on surface and the phenomenal it places us in touch with the under ground, the chthonic and its rich resources. Too, it puts the natural world into our lives, integrates our life with the seasonal rhythms. This goes against the modern emphasis on the new and making things new. Growing food goes back 10,000 years in human history and eating from plants back to the first proto-human.
I wondered today if the post-modern might be a more eclectic era, a time with a willingness to look back into the human past and ahead into the human future with no need for the ideology of reason, fragmentation, the new, yet not being afraid to acknowledge the fruits of scientific reasoning, manufacturing, globalization. Just putzing as I raked.