Dear Friends ~ We started our seeds inside, lining the south-facing windowsills, the same week that a pandemic made itself known to the collective body of the world. Tomatoes, kale, peas, carrots, lettuce, sorrel, beets...each seed tucked into the soil like a sort of prayer for health and a future. In early January, when I made my ritual list of intentions for the new year, I mystified myself writing simply, "tend food". Not "plant" or "grow" or "preserve", as much as tend. My sister-in-law once told me that the actual planting of a garden is the "glamorous" part because it's noticeable and satisfying in the immediate. But growing food also requires long months of patient attention: weeding, watering, waiting, hoping, pruning, tying, waiting, hoping...tending.
In a few weeks' time sprouts emerged and we prepared the garden beds in anticipation. Nearly every day that I spent with a trowel and my hands turning the soil, I would unearth another empty snail shell. These talismans appeared so often that I began to collect them on my dresser, then gifted them to my kids and eventually I just turned them back into the ground. I studied the spirals, rubbed my thumb over the smooth contours and contemplated them as symbols calling us (especially in this uncertain era of social distance) to slow down and journey inward as a means of tending the soul; to "spiral in" during a fraught time when it would be all too possible to unravel. ~ Joy
If we cannot see the multitudinous splendor of light in every form when it is right before our eyes, then we have to be awakened, jolted out of complacency, cast down from the ivory tower, and buried under the black earth of all our materialistic fantasies. It’s quite a shock and painful. Fearing loss, fear will bind us to forms that have already collapsed and are dissolving. But light is there even in the darkness. At the point where one dies, at the point where one stops trying to assert the ego, at the point one gives up in despair, at the point where one says, “I yield. I give in,” then one finds the Divine within.