An ex, who I wasn’t kind to, gave me a tiny succulent once. It was easy to take care of, she said, nearly impossible for me to kill. It died.
I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn at the time. My roommate was someone I had met in line at a concert and remains a sister to me. She had a tiny garden blooming and climbing by the kitchen window. It was mysterious and magical to me, her relationship with plants—but completely foreign
My Brooklyn sister’s kitchen garden
Some tragedies and breakdowns later, I found myself hitching a ride with a stranger to a protest outside an ICE detention center. We talked about a lot of things: why it was so hard to organize in our hometown, why pettiness and cruelty were so common among the people we met doing ‘the work’. I remember the moment exactly, when she asked me if I would be interested in a community garden. She was about to pull out of a gas station and merge into traffic. It was the first thing I was truly interested in since coming back to the Mojave Desert. It was like realizing I’d been holding my breath. I was hesitant, of course. Remember, I killed a succulent, a cactus, a relationship. I thought I was a killer. But after all the meetings and protests and rallies and politics and manipulation, I was willing to try.
That stranger remains a teacher and partner in tending to a community garden on the east side of a town where the train tracks literally divide the richer from the poorer. A partner that told me about an organic farm in the neighboring town, where I became a farmer’s apprentice. The pandemic had hit. Work had dried up. I had time and outside on a farm with a mask was safer than most other places.
I didn’t think I was a killer anymore. I had finally tasted the fruit of my labor—tomatoes made of sun, soil, water, and magic. I could never turn back. I’d learned to recognize mushrooms as community builders and healers from Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running. Even had compound nerd glee that Star Trek Discovery had a scientist named after him who found a way to travel through space on mycelial networks: a spore drive.
My Brooklyn sister had suggested I read The Hidden Life of Trees, reminding me that trees get lonely by themselves, that they talk to each other, share nutrients with those trees in need.
But I didn’t think I knew enough. I wouldn’t have even called myself a gardener. I went to that small farm down a dirt road for months, convinced I knew very little and had much to learn. I thought I’d be able to call myself a farmer after I spent enough time learning from one. What I found, instead, was that farmer would introduce me to my last and final teacher: the plants themselves.
Planting Bok Choi seedlings at the farm
I didn’t really notice it was happening. All I knew was that I needed to spend those long hours in the sun, in the soil, greeting the bees, clearing weeds, pruning tomatoes, finding random toads in the rows, learning how each plant smelled. It kept me sane through the pandemic.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, ecologist and poet, writes in Braiding Sweetgrass that the smell of soil releases oxytocin. A hormone that helps humans bond to one another. Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm says that in West African tradition, the soil is an orisha, alive. Something documentaries like Kiss the Ground are starting to popularize. As if humans only just realized they had a responsibility to the ground beneath their feet. As if there aren’t traditions across the world that have said the same for generations, ignored by the agriculture of empire.
These words made sense of my need to use my hands, see things grow, smell dirt. There I was, fancying myself an aspiring steward of the land. Instead, the land was stewarding me. What other explanation can I have after watching plants make enough food to feed themselves and others, from just soil, water and sun? All our history of invention, and we’re still not smarter than plants.
I’m glad though. I’m frankly tired of learning from humans.
I don’t know what to call myself now.
I’m better at not killing out of ignorance or shame,
I’m not a gardener who’s in charge of what plants do,
I’m not a farmer who sees plants as a source of income.
I will never know enough to be a steward of the land.
Maybe a title will come with time,
as I listen.
As I try to remember the language of my teachers.
Or perhaps
There doesn’t need to be a title, at all.