Spring Waning Seed Moon
Friend Bill Schmidt passed these quotation on, sent to him by a friend. I like the Hawthorne quote a lot because it captures an elusive feeling I often have when walking the grounds.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria
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I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.
It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne captures in the concrete this more abstract idea from Thomas Berry: “Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.”
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As I thought about these quotes, this jumped out: Want to live like they did 10,000 years ago? Put in a garden. If it was good enough for the neolithic revolution, it’s good enough for me.
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We humans did not always tend to our gardens. We stood up on two legs, dropped off body hair, ran through savannahs, painted in caves and developed our gracile mind long before we realized seeds and plants went together.
Horticulture precedes agriculture and may again. Latin hortus garden + cultura cultivation
Agriculture: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin agricultura, from ager field + cultura cultivation.
We worked small plots, or gardens, before the advent of fields or large scale cultivation. I have a book in my library that I’ve not read (ok, I have a lot of books in my library I’ve not read), but this one has the title Human Scale. Horticulture is human scale cultivation; agriculture is large scale cultivation.
As I’ve thought back over my life, I’ve noticed a common thread in many of the things I’ve done and co-operative efforts to which I’ve given energy: they are an attempt to wrest human scale decision making authority and human scale work back from impersonal bureaucracies or larger scale political and economic entities. Horticulture fits. Continue reading Post ID 2354