Gardening is my joy and my agony. It’s my joy for all the reasons gardeners already understand and non-gardeners never want to hear about. But it is my agony because in my family, I am the only one who likes to work outside – the children did not inherit the dig-in-the-dirt gene. What that means on a practical level is that in the Summer, when life is relatively leisurely, there is plenty of time to do everything that needs to be done. In the Fall, however, when life gears up to its school-year pace, the lawn and garden get to be a bit too much to handle. When it gets to that point, I start taking shortcuts.
That’s what happened last Fall, the first one after we moved to our new home. Though my goal is gradually to turn most of the yard into edible landscaping, the home as purchased has a decent amount of grass to maintain until then. Keeping up with the weeds organically was no problem as long as I had time to go around and pull them. With the onset of Fall, though, the crabgrass sprouts began to take over and spread their dreaded seeded tillers across the lawn. In frustration and out of fear of losing a season’s hard work just as frost was about to put everything to bed, I made a rookie mistake.
I pulled every piece of crabgrass out of the ground, seeds and all, and walked them over to the compost pile – then threw them all in.
Starting early this Summer, the "fruits" of my mistake began to show themselves with hundreds of seedlings in the yard, rapidly spreading themselves comfortably into full-fledged young crabgrass plants. Partly to keep to an organic regimen and partly as an act of contrition for my foolishness, I resolved to teach myself a lesson and get on my hands and knees and hand-pull as much of it as I could in the sixty-five days or so that one has between germination and going to seed for that weed.
The first decision was strategy. Should I start in the relatively clear and healthy near portion of the yard or the weed-choked back? I decided on a two-pronged approach, spending half my time clearing the healthy lawn and half working on two random parts of the crabgrass thicket. So, weeder and bucket and kneeling pad in hand, off I went to work.
As you might imagine (or, as an organic gardener don’t have to imagine at all), this sort of weeding is a very repetitive activity. It requires attention, but it allows the mind to wander a bit and focus on any number of items that present themselves. One of the first things I learned was how very little I had really ever paid attention to that ecosystem that is a grass lawn. The vast numbers of insects above and below ground, the spiders, the worms, the toads, the robins, the catbirds all thriving in that culture, disturbed only by my to them arbitrary human decision what plants would stay and what would go.
It wasn’t just the fauna, of course; I was there for the flora in the first place, after all. And what flora! I began to learn a great deal about the habits of crabgrass. It behaves very differently when all bunched together – it is much easier to pull when still young, as it never has an opportunity to spread its leaves to feed deeper roots. Still, if left to spread in such a crowded condition, the tangled mat that results is almost impossible to clear. I learned that crabgrass may be the most obvious weed, but that chickweed and knotgrass, which spread in all directions and take root wherever their stems or roots spread, are much more insidious, invidious and hideous. I learned that some of what I thought was healthy lawn was in reality stands of quackgrass, which tend to look good until you are close to them and see they have spread to choke out all other forms of grass and have died and matted into heavy thatch.
It wasn’t long until I was beginning to ponder all the lessons and parables nature was providing me. Nature always will, you know, if you get close enough to let it. This being a heavy political season, I found myself assigning the attributes of weeds to different types of political thinking or situations, especially the conservative type of thinking prevalent in more rural places such as where I grew up. As a literal truth and as a parable, individual plants were easy to pull before they got out of hand; but if too many weeds got pulled in a heavy patch, there was nothing but bare earth left – fertile ground only for weeds to return again. It was better for heavy infestations to work from the edges inward, giving the healthy grass time to spread into the newly opened ground.
Of course it wasn’t long until I was involuntarily laughing to myself about my work at the grassroots! In a few days I became very mindful of the strength of the sun during all that work. That turned my thoughts to migrant workers and others in agriculture who do the hard labor in the heat of the sun for many more hours and in much less pleasant circumstances. On weekends, when going in for lunch, I became much more careful with the lettuce and tomatoes, thinking of the conditions others had endured to bring them to my table.
Those thoughts began to occupy my mind more and more as I worked over the days. I found myself getting angry at the powers-that-be and the powers-that-want-to-be, at how little attention they gave the poor, the undocumented, the exploited, the hungry. Why weren’t they talking about and working on those important issues more? Why don’t they respond or even listen when I write to them about it?
It was then, in the heat of separating the suburban wheat from the chaff, that it finally came to me:
Those in power really don’t care what you think. They don’t need to – only to the extent that they might hope for your money or your vote. There are others whose voices will always matter more to them, by nature of wealth or status or proximity. BUT those who are less fortunate than you, they do care what you think – even more, what you do. And in truth, your pretty speeches have been no more effective for them than has the inaction of those you rail against. YOU have power, albeit at a smaller level. And YOU are not using it. Hoping that others will show the way to more enlightened governance, and waiting for that time, working to help others get greater power – power that of necessity means adjusting one’s message to those in a position to keep you in power - is time wasted, when the needs are near and they are pressing.
Of course, that is nothing new under the sun... nothing earth-shattering (thankfully!). But it was immensely liberating and frightening at the same time. Others are not responsible for saving this country. I am. And my neighbors. And in the coming years, we are going to have to rely on one another much more than the current culture has trained us to think we will need.
A woman who was one of the founders of my faith tradition recorded a wonderful saying: "You will say, 'Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say?" (Those who share my particular tradition might agree that this should now be amended to "The New York Times saith this, and Martin Luther King says this; but what canst thou say? – but I digress). The source of action, of having the courage to speak and to act, comes from within, even if informed by others. We all know the idea of "speaking truth to power," but most are much less comfortable with "using power for truth," because acknowledging our personal power and privilege brings us to the uncomfortable place where we have to use that power and privilege we already possess to assist those who need our help, not the help of someone far away who can neither know nor care at such a personal level.
So the crabgrass helped me determine what I will be doing up until this November and beyond. I will be working to assist my immigrant neighbors, many of whom are being wrongfully discriminated against. They feel the heat in many ways I never will and could never speak up in ways I can. Many of them cannot vote so cannot be pandered to and will not be considered in the corridors of "power." Maybe if they will have me, we can find our own sources of power, together.
Maybe all that time and work spent at the grassroots level was worth it. Time will tell. For now, areas where things were already in good shape are holding their own. Clear patches here and there are beginning to be visible in the less productive places. The work won’t be done by Fall, or even next year or the next; but the work has begun and is showing signs of making a difference.
Crossposted at Political Flesh Feast.