Now and for nearly 30 years, I have played against type, living and working in southern, coastal Louisiana. This is a very rooted place, except for the contradictory forces that are quickly eroding the land away, so staying or going will eventually, in many places, not be a choice. And there remains the question of community and where people will go and how they will sustain their sense of who they are afterward. I just found a quote from Walter Benjamin, talking about the end of WW I, but which seems so appropriate to what is happening here and across the country and worldwide in this time of social and economic turmoil and change that seems to have thrown us all back to first principles. “A generation…now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” My ardent hope is that we can work at a human scale to move into more positive territory.

What a lovely response and story about your own relationship to your garden and land and father. I love it.

Your words remind me that it doesn’t matter why we sink our hands into the dirt, just that we do, whether in our own gardens if we are lucky enough to have them, or in our surroundings by noticing, seeing, considering the relationships within the larger, not just human, world.

I’ve been thinking, too, these past days about privilege and gardening, about Barbara Ehrenreich’s recentish post on the poor and the Nouveau Poor. I have another post brewing now in longer response to you and to her article and to the changes at our farmers market. See? Your comment on my last post has helped unblock the blogging floodgates. I go from having absolutely nothing to say to having too much!

An interesting thought train– if I can condense to my understanding, what are the implications for people, society when we no longer have a survival need connected to our land? When we become disconnected with it? When we don’t even dip our hands in our own dirt or know what kinds of trees are natural to our neighborhood?

My Dad was not an academic or very outspoken; he worked a government paperwork job full of integrity, struggled life long with after effects of a childhood concussion, and lived for cutting his grass, nursing the dogwood trees, and trimming the forsythia bushes. he did not say a whole lot, but one thing stuck with me when he told me to “never be afraid to get your hands dirty.”

He did rub off on me, and I recall him letting me do a project of turning the end of our yard in a “natural” area by trying to grow there just the tings that blew in or I was able to transplant for nearby.

And today I find daily joy in exploring my 1/3 of an acre, in landscaping it with just the materials that are here, in re-using every bit of fallen trees as compost, and small limbs for winter kindling, and channeling runoff to cascading planted areas… I snuck in some penstemon I found in the forest, and have a favorite wildflower patch where pretty much what grows is what blows in (I still have this dandelion aversion).

My garden is not quite as organic (plants bought from a nursery); and its the time of year when life is just too strong to be bothered by the elements, that the eggplants I thought would not make it are not pushing out new leaves daily.

So for myself, for Dad, I just dig getting my hands in the dirt.

Another thought- I was i Hawaii recently and taking in all the lush foliage at a mountain top park (anywhere that green is a shock for someone from Arizona), and my friend Bert reminded me that most of what was there was introduced. Even the forests I enjoy here as “natural” are not the forests they were before settlement. And I thus feel a wee bit disconnected even when immersed in a forest walk.

Oops, how did this comment grow so long? Lastly, I love the closing shot of Finn- sometimes in life you just have to let your head hang out the window and let your ears flop in the wind- for the sheer joy of the rush on our senses.