According the to Bible, gardening is the oldest profession. Our connection with the land is encoded in our DNA. City-dwelling humans twelve stories up in a high rise will grace their windowsills with a pot of something green to be responsible for. Without a bit of earth to tend and mend, the human psyche is left at loose ends.
If there were more gardeners in the world, there would be fewer warriors. It is not scarcity that breeds greed, but unnourishing plenty. The more stuff we accumulate beyond our needs, the less space we have left to live in.
A garden teaches us that it is not what we acquire that satisfies our hungry souls, but what we give. For most of us it is much less expensive and labor intensive to buy our tomatoes at the store. But innumerable suburban backyards host a small plot where folk must sweat and strain under the hot sun to have their tomatoes. Our first ancestors struck a bargain with the land, to take something out you must first put something in. In our post-modern world, there are a plethora of methods for subverting that process, but every time we yield to that temptation, something doesn’t taste quite as good to us.
If you can’t have a garden, tend a bonsai or a potted geranium to be reminded every day that the Earth sustains us and that one must nourish to be nourished.
“Remember, human, that you were dust and you will be again.”
Henry I am so incredibly grateful to whatever forces brought you into my life , your writing strikes a chord every time.
Master Gardener, thanks for this timely essay!...I can only hope there will be enough of us who believe and adopt that simple equation, ' in order to be nourished, you must nourish ' and that essential corollary ' dust you were and to dust you will return ' to facilitate our survival... otherwise we don't deserve it!