Gardening in Our Own Hell

Earth Day and Arbor Day are sometimes lampooned as trying too hard.  This Saturday I found out we are not trying hard enough.  We are wantonly setting a course for our own destruction and are hypocritically happy about it.  We are killing ourselves instead of toiling.  It makes me long for the good old days of thinking toiling in the ground was a curse.  I long for that curse to come back to the forefront of people’s hearts and souls.

On Saturday one of my friends and I dug out, leveled, and cultivated a 50 sq. ft. plot of land in our backyard and a separate 20 sq. ft plot behind the garage.  We both got blisters, the fruits of the curse to toil with the earth to produce fruit.  It was hot out, a record high for NJ of 95 degrees on April 25th, and I was pleased that we had accomplished so much and were ready to plant.

Then my neighbor came over and asked if we were planting vegetables again this year.  A little taken a back, I replied, "Yes."

"I don’t think you should, because the neighbor behind me just sprayed for termites.  You shouldn’t plant any vegetables near termite spray for around seven years because it is injected into the ground with rods.  It poisons the ground."

I must have had a suspicious look on my face, because she continued.

"That’s what they told me when my house was sprayed, and now I plant in planters on my patio.  You should look it up on the internet at least to make sure."

I went inside and brought out the laptop and dusted off my hands and began typing away.  It didn’t take long to get at the truth.

The ground, the ground I walked on, tilled, toiled on, sweated since we have lived in this place: poisoned.  Right below my feet.  The soil was a zombie.  It looked alive but it was really like the "walking dead."  It’s fruit would only kill.

The curse in the beginning was the painful frustration of toil.  The bleeding, the sweating, the never ending work to get what we eat.  In our technological world I crave that opportunity, the opportunity to participate in God’s curse.  Because compared to man’s curse, our poisoning of every bit of ground, stream, and air we can get our greedy hands on, God’s curse looks like such a blessing.

——

If you are curious for more, read The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry.