Global Courant 2023-05-29 15:00:18
There were times this winter when I wasn’t sure if I would make it back in my garden. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, would have time, would care. I wasn’t sure if it would ever stop raining.
After six of the warmest years on record in California, after five years of record wildfires, amid the driest period in 1,200 years, this year’s record snowfall, the torrent of torrential rain seemed more than Earth could handle.
More water is a net good after prolonged drought, but it’s also an inconvenient reward. During the storms, our roads washed away, our fields turned into ancient lakes. Now more infrastructure will be challenged by the massive melting snow that is coming. Hills that bloom from heavy rains will produce more tinder for the next wildfire. Last winter’s storms felt ominous. Now El Niño could bring another catastrophically wet winter, and climate change could unleash a cycle of superstorms.
The sun is shining now and the weather is mild. It may seem that the harsh winter should have nothing to do with the work I do in my garden and a nearby community garden. Yet I still have the fallen trees, the swept away houses, the skipped rivers in my head and in my body.
There’s a phrase friends of mine are starting to use: “climate sadness,” our sharp sadness that the planet we knew is moving horribly, that we’re losing pieces of it, in real time, before our very eyes. As I climbed over fallen redwoods that littered the road after one of the worst storms in March, I realized that my climate grief is masquerading as numbness, disgust, anger, and despair. It makes me feel that whatever we do now — whether it’s cleaning up our yards, building more resilient wetlands, voting for decent climate policies — will be too little, too late. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
And yet, as I sweep away the layers of wet mud and add some dry straw to the compost, turning soil, planting seedlings, looking for weeds, I’ve found that my anger and my numbness and my sadness are actually places I need to come, excavate, excavate, feel. I have to go into a garden, to work through the grief, to engage it.
When I garden, I lose, at least for a few hours, that feeling only a catastrophe of losses is imminent. For a moment I lose the nagging feeling that there is no hope, that we don’t care, that we are irrevocably broken. Instead, I set intentions for dark, microbe-rich soil. I discover things that can survive – some mint, some carrots, a record crop of potatoes – and things that arise voluntarily: a cucumber plant, on the edge of the compost heap.
The garden also heals my numbness in other ways. Since our garden is in our front yard, I share plants with my neighbours. I don’t have enough sun for everything I want to grow, so Ari keeps my potted blueberry bushes in her garden and we share the fruit. Stephen, who was born outside of Kharkiv, has an annual tradition of bringing specialty Ukrainian tomato varieties, a variety that thrives here despite the Bay Area’s summer fog.
I trade seeds and start for straw from my coop, which other gardeners love for its nutrients. Dalya, who lives two doors down, drops by to share insights on growing shitakes on loam in a shaded side yard. She elaborates on the amazing fact of mycelial networks, the great web they build in the soil.
Above ground I suddenly feel less angry or scared or desperate or alone.
In record year after record years, I stop and look at a pea blossom, faint green veins weaving its pale green face. I weed daikon with my daughter and cut garden leaves to make a pesto with my son. We make a salad of turnip sprouts. We water our plants with a bucket that catches the now-innocuous stream from our backyard sink.
We can’t save what we don’t love. When I’m in the garden I realize that my sadness is actually another name for this love, is a call to go out and take care of this planet that we often feel we’re losing before our very eyes. When I do, I remember that my actions matter and that life is stronger and more surprising than I knew, and both of those things help me on the road ahead.
“Whether in a garden plot or in pots in front of a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden,” says my friend Camille Dungy, who has just published a book of essays called “Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden”..” She says taking care of plants can help us find some of the grace we need to care for each other and the planet. “It’s part of our job not to miss the tremendous beauty that’s left,” says my friend, the poet Jane Hirshfield. We still need to celebrate “everything left to salvage,” as marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson puts it.
The garden reminds us that despite what has been destroyed, what is in danger, we can build, adapt, repair. In doing so, we find joy in what is left, in what we can still share, together, now.
Tess Taylor is an award-winning poet. A new anthology she edited, “Leaning towards the light: poems for gardens and the hands that tend them”, will be published in August. She lives and gardens in El Cerrito.
