True Leaves: How Growing Food Changed My Life. Part One.

The Tomato leaves look drought worn, like a sad piece of tattered fabric draped over a coat rack . So many leaves already dried and brown, like dark lace petticoats. They don't even rustle, for there is no breeze to do the rustling.  They are crisp in the hot early morning air, with the light barely touching the edges of the sky. A sleepy dawn, with hardly any birds awake and the air was already a preheating oven.

Not all hope was lost, I thought, seeing many tomatoes still blushing red, but as I reached my hand out to pluck a few, I brush the dead leaves that are everywhere underneath, and a heaviness pulls my chest down into the dirt beneath my shoes.  

What did I do wrong?  

It seemed like a question that I wasn’t asking the tomatoes, but my own self.

My whole existence.

I take a slow quiet look around the garden into the trees that block the view of a second garden plot -a field- with more plants that are struggling worse than these well nourished, deep rooted tomato plants.

It’s been hotter and dryer than is normal. Even the ticks have all dried up and died.  Even with diligent watering and mulch, the plants just can’t take how hot it has been. Or at least that's what I tell myself. Maybe, it wasn't the heat, maybe I had finally stretched myself too thin. Too many things to do, none of them getting the attention they deserved.

A year earlier things had gone much differently, I had started with four raised beds, and quickly we had tilled a decent sized garden plot.  I had started with such an exuberance, such an understanding that what I was doing would work.  I had done months of research before hand and years before that of a small yearning to grow my own food.  It was something I had dreamt of for a long time. Somehow, I always knew I wanted to grow food in some capacity, I just didn’t realize that it was possible.  

The first time I grew something from seed - more than 7 years ago- something changed in me that I would have never expected. I always think of it as if part of my mind just clicked and instantly, my brain had created a new neural circuit. Except it felt deeper than that, more primal, more ancient. As if it was something that had been there, all along, waiting in the foggy depths of an endless strand of DNA. Waiting to be switched on.

I had begun the journey in our apartment before I even knew having a real garden was in the cards for me. Our apartment did not have a balcony, but I did not let that stop me. At the time I was struggling with daily life, including a deep depression. Our apartment was a construction zone, my career was unfulfilling and my soul longed for a life I was, at the time, not allowing myself to reach for. I have always been a creative person, but I felt myself dying inside, felt the flames dwindling, the passion slowly being snuffed;  though, at the time I did not care to admit this, the idea of losing the one true thing I needed to survive was terrifying beyond all else. And with it was dying my sense of self. Who the hell was I anymore?

I was being increasingly indoctrinated into a world of absolutes, a world of brick and mortar, of suffering and hardship, of sacrifice for.. the greater...good? Letting the world tell me who I was had been the longest and hardest lesson I have ever sat through. It was a slow and sneaking thing, something that I had allowed over many years; shedding who I was, to try to fit into who I thought I should be instead.

Somewhere between the darkness of my chronic anxiety and the life I had allowed myself to melt into, I saw seeds in the grocery store.

I had grown things like herbs from starter plants, in pots on balconies in previous places of residence, but I had never given a thought to trying to grow something from a seed.

I was in such a place of rut and anxiety, self-hate and numbness that I didn’t hesitate when I decided, right then, that growing some food was EXACTLY what I was going to do.  The track was laid before me, and it cleared a path in the darkness.  Even, if the path was narrow, and the light was only feet ahead of me, it was something moving forward, it was something other than stagnation in my mind and my surroundings.

So, with very little knowledge and a fierce determination, I bought the seeds, soil, some pots and some starter trays. I went at it in the kitchen by the window and a week or so later realized I needed a shelf and grow lights. The experiment gave me a sense of direction that I had not had in a long time. It occupied the back doors of my mind, the attics and basements that had once been filled with story telling and creating new worlds, that were now barren and waiting for something to light them up. This… this might not have been what my mind had been expecting, but it was a light nonetheless. The windows of my brain were being passed through by this light.. this green warmth, this idea of letting go; the idea that the seed was everything it needed to be, and I was just the hand that gave it water and darkness, allowing it to break through the darkness and Be.

I looked at the seedlings and marveled. How absolutely ground breaking! From something so small and unassuming, came something so vibrantly green and living. 

Living.  Alive.

I had let forth into the quietness of the kitchen, something loud.

Something demanding attention. Life.  

The key to the whole thing was that, I had somehow persuaded life. And not just any life, life that would grow into something edible. A source of food that I had nurtured forward. 

Somehow, I realized in that moment, that growing your own food was an earthbound magic. It was so magical, in fact, that we had left the sorcery to a select few, and forgotten its potency in ourselves. Anyone can grow food.

Why and how we forgot this magic is not something I rightly know, but I suspect, like many things, it was killed out of convenience. We, in our modern lives, don’t have time for things as elaborate as growing food.

That was how it started and it changed my life.

I grew lettuce, a few radishes, a handful of beans, tomato plants that didn’t really yield any tomatoes, tons of basil, and a few other herbs. 

It was more than just growing food, it was a doorway… to something I hadn’t felt in a long time; happiness?  Joy? Love even?

Through the turbulence that were parts of my life, I felt a stability in the perfection of the growth of each and every seedling. Though the chaos of the world swirled around them, they just grew. They just became. They just knew.

I don’t think I realized it then, but I craved what they had. I had known it once… the ability to just Be, to become, to Know. But I did not have that anymore. The plants gave me a glimpse into the thing I had lost, egging me forward, silently smiling and knowing that everything was all the way it should be, simply  because they trusted that they had all the knowledge they needed to become. All of it had a purpose for them, none of it was better or worse than the rest. They were already masters at their existence. They were already living in the present moment. Not worried about the past, not worried about the future… content and flowing, rich and abundant and giving to the very fabric of reality.