Gardening

Tonight we finished another day of garden construction. Gardening is a never ending endeavor where we novice gardeners are blindly trying to take one patch of grass and turn it in to something that's delicious and eco-friendly. It's amazing how far we, as a society have strayed from this pretty historically typical activity. Since humans have stopped being hunter and gathers, we've grown our year's food from the plot of land that we lived on. It supplied our clothes, heat in the winter and the materials to build a shelter. But through our so called progress, we've lost so much generational wisdom on how to survive on the land. Yes life in some ways is easier, we don't have to walk miles to get water, we have indoor plumbing, and for the most part we have food in the fridge. But we've lost our deep connection to that which sustains us. For me the earth, and my relationship to it is a profoundly sacred one. We've lost the understanding that food doesn't come from the supermarket. Heat doesn't just come from the box on the wall or that never ending fountain of natural gas spewing from underground pipes.

We have such hubris to believe that human innovation can conquer any problem. Yet it seems that often we fail to see the long term impacts of our inventions.

I hope that this garden will allow me to develop a relationship with this small part of Portland and take a small step towards remembering how our ancestors eked out their existence.