Playing with Dirt

Spring Garlic by http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcauliflower/

Grab. Sift. Let go.

My daughter sitting, covered in dirt.

She rubs her eyes and then notices I am looking at her. Our glances meet. She has raccoon eyes and dirt all over her dress and leggings.

We have come out to inspect the spring garlic. Part of me wants to tell her to stop getting herself dirty. Then I look at my own hands, dirt under my fingernails. Let her be I say to myself.

I let her keep playing with the dirt and camouflaging  the bright purple of her leggings under the silty brown of the loam.

I want my daughter to have a sense of place. To know where she is from. To know the dirt beneath the foundation of our home. To know the dirt that provides some of the food she eats.

In the subtlety of her budding language and personality, she is picking up a deep sense of the places that my wife and I are from, like she is following a vapor trail and collecting remnants of the places where my wife and I have lived but she has never been.

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It’s six thirty in the morning and my wife and daughter jump into bed to wake me up. Can you go get bagels? my wife asks. Bay-gals my daughter says. We haven’t had bagels in a long time my wife adds, for emphasis. In New Jersey, a long time without bagels is defined as three mornings. We haven’t had any bagels since Easter Sunday. I rise and go for a quick run to the bagel shop. This is how my daughter will know she is from New Jersey. This is how she knows her place.

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My daughter opens doors for you and closes them with the gentile quality of a Southern belle. She does not get this trait from the aloof neighborliness of the New Jerseyans and New Yorkers. She must have picked it up from me, the more chivalrous mid-Atlantic and Southern type. When my wife and I started dating she was amazed when I held the door from her. No one did that where she was from. She asked me to stop.

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We have taught our daughter to stay away from hot objects. She says hot. Not hot like normal people say it. She says hwuawwt. Exactly like the stereotypical New Jerseyans talk on all those reality shows. The sound makes me cringe.

I am trying to bring her back from the dark side with her pronunciation of coffee, but I think I’ve lost her for good.

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My daughter plays in the dirt. For a place called the garden state it is now conspicuously devoid of gardens most everywhere you go. New Jerseyans are concrete and pavement gardeners now. But somehow, deep within her, she recognizes the beauty of the dirt. Why I love. She may even feel the connection I feel to it, how I took for granted for so long the fact that I drove by corn fields, soybeans and a nasty smelling pig farm on the way to school, how I bailed oats and shucked corn, how I missed dirt only when I no longer had it.

We made our way back inside. It was getting cold, and we didn’t have jackets on. The little one bent down, adultlike, trying to take her sandals off, childlike. I shook her off and trotted her in to get changed. My wife was on the phone with her sister. We were looking at the garlic I said to her, a brief explanation to answer the what-on-earth face I was receiving.

The silt was microscopic. I could feel it as I walked barefoot. But the floor did not look dirty. There was only an invisible grittiness. The grit of the earth. The grit of place. The grit of play, of location, of home, of knowledge.

The Cubicle Garden

 The seeds are all ordered and set to arrive any day now, but I could not help myself and decided to get a head start on gardening season this year with a cubicle garden.

I ordered two Simple Garden Jr. three pot planters and planted cilantro, thyme, basil, oregano, parsley and cumin.

Central to the food ethics series I have written over the past few months is that we must learn to take control of the food we eat. What better way than to grow it.

You do not need a lot of land or a green thumb to start gardening. All you need is free fluorescent light and a desk at work, add some dirt and seeds and away you go.

Where is the craziest place you have planted a garden?

Seeds We Are Sowing

This year, thanks to our little one’s penchant for peas, soybeans and peppers, the garden is going to look a bit different this year. We have also discovered the wonders of pickling greens—kale, collards and mustard greens—and the garden reflects that. Here are the seeds we have ordered.

Envy Soya Beans – a nice soybean for edamame.

Arugula – who doesn’t like to eat something that goes by the name “rocket”?

Garden Cress – they grow fast. We’ll keep them in the shade and have salad all the time (then get sick of it, then get hooked again).

Mustard Greens Southern Giant Curled – superb for pickling, especially when they are babies.

Dwarf Siberian Kale – I don’t know how dwarf and Siberia go together, but we grew these last year and they are hearty.

Sugar Ann Snap Pea – the catalog says they aren’t fussy, don’t need to be tressled and have large quantities of fruit. All big pluses!

Anaheim Pepper – for the kiddo who likes a little bit of kick every once in a while.

Albino Bullnose Pepper – super sweet little bell peppers. Not sure how I’ll keep the bugs away from these yet.

Lipstick Pepper – a pimiento style pepper with a feminine side.

Corne De Chevre Pepper – a super spicy Basque pepper from Spain.

What are you planting in your garden this year? Any tips for keeping pests off of sweet peppers?

Creation, Food & Kingdom Come

This is the second post on the subject of Creation Care, one of the five spheres of a Christian ethic of eating.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. (Genesis 1:29-30)

One of the sticking points for Christians on both sides of the creation care issue is the definition of subdue. Subdue can either mean

train, domesticate, neuter, control, extract value

or

love, care for, nurture, protect, watch over

How you view creation is rooted in what your view of God is. Is God a controlling god, one who subdues you by lassoing you like a wild horse and taming you until you submit to his every command? Or, is God a nurturing god, one who subdues you by loving, caring, watching over and protecting?

The whole tone of Genesis 1 is of a nurturing God. As covered in the previous post, God’s nature is one of a gardener. In Genesis 1 in particular, God is a loving protector. The Spirit subdues the earth by hovering over it like a mother bird cares for her young. God gives the earth to humankind and says subdue it, but we cannot interpret “subdue” the way humankind has distorted it—reigning in, harnessing, and breaking until something is under control. We are called to be like God, and God subdues things through love, nurture and overcoming.

So what does this have to do with food? If we care for creation, we must care about food. Creation is primarily a large garden, available to us for our food, as the passage above elaborates. This is not the way the world operates though.

The world, but particularly in America, subdues creation in a negative way—to break it down and tame it so that every bit of value can be extracted from it. Take this attitude to its logical conclusion, and you end up with large scale material waste, deadly pollution, mountaintop removal mining, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and chemically eviscerated soil and waterways.

There is hope though. Through Christ’s kingdom, we are called to no longer conform to the patterns of this world but be transformed. Part of this transformation must be to commit to treat the earth the way God did at creation and continues to do so even now: with love and nurture, until the time comes when there is a new heavens and new earth.

We don’t know when that time will be, but we have time right now. Let’s use it to continue God’s loving protection and care for all creation.

Discussion Questions:

How do you view the call to subdue?

Think about how your daily actions affect creation. Are you contributing to harming the earth or protecting it? Or both?

What are some changes you can make to your daily routine to help nurture and take care of the earth?

The Theology of Gardening

This is the first post on the subject of Creation Care, one of the five spheres of a Christian ethic of eating.

Let’s start at the beginning, or in the beginning, if you prefer.

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

The LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:8-9)

God made us in his image and planted a garden. These two events are not independent of one another. If we are made in the image of God, we are by nature gardeners.

And if we are by nature gardeners, then how we treat the earth is a really big deal.

Gardeners do not pollute the soil, because gardeners do not want polluted food.

Gardeners care for the soil, because gardeners want nutritious food.

Gardeners care about the streams, rivers, rain and waters around them, because gardeners need to cultivate their gardens with care.

Gardeners care about the surrounding land and ecosystem, because gardeners understand that what happens nearby can affect them.

Gardeners care about food, because gardeners invest a lot of time, effort, and worry into their gardens.

So how does this translate into a theology of gardening? It means that we are all called to have a gardener’s perspective on creation. How you treat creation is just as big of responsibility as it is the gardeners or farmers because we all share the same image, the same call. And it should come as no surprise that the way we treat the earth is just as tarnished as his image is in our lives.

Moving further, into a deeper theology of gardening, if we tarnish the earth because of our tarnished images, part of our sanctification is that we learn to take better care of the earth as our image is restored.

Whoever you are, whatever you do: you are called to be like God the gardener. You are called to take better care of the earth.

Discussion Questions:

Have you ever considered that caring for creation is part of God’s nature?

Do you think caring for the earth is a sign of growing in faith (sanctification)?

How can you have a gardener’s perspective in your food buying habits? In your recycling or waste habits?

Talking to Plants

Something a bit different has been happening this year, in our fourth year of gardening.

I’ve started saying good morning to the tomato plants in the morning as I walk to my car, like they’re a pet. Maybe because I am the sole caretaker of the plants now that my wife is running around after our child, but I’ve taken a larger stake in the well being of our garden. So I say hi to the tomato plants.

They are doing quite well actually, I’m proud to say. The first one should be red enough to pick when I get home today.