Well, I kind of got distracted with my gardening the past few days. I did do my veggie garden, I planted tomatoes, green beans, carrots, and onions. We will see how it all turns out. That was all pretty easy since the garden was already there. I just tilled it up and planted my veggies. I also planted Thyme, Rosemary, Sage, and Chamomile in pots for inside. None of this took very long so I got to thinking, what about the flower garden? There are a ton of pretty flowers out front around the pond but you can barely see through the weeds. There are so many different antiques, concrete statues, and neat little homemade garden accessories. I got birdhouses and pretty lights, colorful stones… I have everything I need!
This is some hardcore gardening! I got my battle wounds all over my arms and legs. I hate shoes so i have been outside barefoot digging up rocks and building the walkway around the pond to the front door. I’m having a lot of fun doing all this but im definantly discovering muscles. It feels so good to be covered in dirt and digging. The earth and the plants smell so good. This reminds me of one of my favorite classics, “The Grapes of Wrath.”
“The tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws champ on the hay, and the ear and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of the land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.”
Steinbeck describes it so perfectly. America messed with something it shouldnt have. Our way of life. Now life is so different and people like me have to fight against it. The government is trying so hard to make sure we can’t get that life back. We have no freedoms anymore.
“For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving the dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.”
This is how I feel when I am gardening. I am one with the earth. I can relate to her and I understand her. This is the closest I can get to God besides the Bible. God created me and He created all the elements to work together so perfectly, it will provide for us, and sustain his Children. I do not want to live in a world that is man-made, it would be like telling God, “I can do it better on my own”
The H Files 