It takes time to understand the core meaning of this sentence. Of course witty Voltaire did not mean it for us to literally dig and plant and weed and harvest our garden, nor did he encourage us to live off the fat of the land. That would be his archnemesis' fashion, le cher Jean-Jacques, the philosophizing Tartuffe himself.
But Voltaire's beau mot became my motto as I compared my front and back gardens, took notice of sun and shadow, surveyed the terrain and calculated the optimal sun exposure per day per week per month and per season... all with the aim of becoming a "gentlewoman-farmer", or rather an "urban food-grower."
At heart I am a country girl who is happier when "playing dirty," with soil under my broken fingernails, mud on my toes, and the sun my only cosmetic. Long walks in the woods, observing birds and bears, finding praying mantises, spotting fish jumping out ot the lake or animal tracks, and learning the name of trees and plants bring me the sort of pleasure Teresa of Avila enjoyed in her Ecstasy. In Nature I find peace, I find myself and I find God.
It took me years to come to terms with this aspect of my personality. Years and a few good books. Maybe it's age after all, or all those Montaigne's Essays we were forced to read and explain when we were in High School, or the perusing of thinkers and writers like Thoreau and his Walden, Rudolf Steiner's The Agriculture Course, Annie Dillard and her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Barbara Kingsolver and her self-sufficient year she describes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and more recently Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemna and In Defense of Food, which I read after screening Food, Inc. Recently I also stumbled upon Wendell Berry's poems and other writings, which may have been just what I needed to finalize my education and who could be considered as a Walden-Steiner combination with an Amish twist and a few other tricks up his sleeve.
If I dig into my youth, I can already detect the first filaments of what my daughter calls "Mom's inner hip-hippie-peacenik-side." Tolstoy was my favorite writer from the moment I read War and Peace. When I read Anna Karenina, especially Part 3, Chapter 4 in which Levine cuts the hay with a scythe along with the peasants, I became convinced that for the Earth to survive, it would be necessary to put a brake on progress, to slow down instead of to constantly grow. Decrease, not increase. Save, not spend. Make, not buy. I felt like a prophet in the desert for the next 30 years...
My ecological epiphany never left me, although I toned down my enthusiastic declarations of ecological independence and refrained from writing more Constitutions of the United States of the Earth. Somehow, my fellow-citizens and college mates thought I was just a jester, another fool in the realm of dreams, living in the kingdom of Chimera CSA. Now, they are all joining their own CSAs, brag about the bounty of their weekly basket and the benefits of biodynamic agriculture. I am so happy they finally saw the light that I do not waver my finger at them in an "I-told-you-so" gesture, neither do I claim my 5 minutes of recognition.
Top right: Photo of my garden at the beginning of June 2010
Bottom left: Photo of my first harvest, first week of July 2010.
1 comment:
really like this.
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