Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "sustainability"

As we prepare our hollow for spring, including turning over the garden and planting seeds, I am once again seeing that my role in aiding the sustainability of the hollow’s natural community is very small. In terms of changes, I only need to plant a few trees, remove vines during winter and be careful to take as little of the hollow for my own purposes as needed, so that the natural community can thrive through its own flow of good works in the Earthly river of life.

The Earth is a vast network of natural communities like our hollow sustainably flowing through imaginable eons of time. In the same way, human families and communities can sustain ourselves through loving each other in our daily actions.

A necessary part of sustainability is that parents care of their children and the community supports young families. For me, my journey toward the feminine helped me see that as a man, I had a role to be a helpmate to my wife in caring for her children. Likewise, as a community member, loving my neighbors means caring for young families and seeking a community that supports the Earthly flow of life into eternity.

In traditional patriarchy, which has held sway for millennia in most of what is called civilization, this is reversed in an unsustainable way of life. The woman, already tasked with caring for her children, is supposed to serve her husband and the children to obey them. This creates a society where isolated male egos determine the direction of the community and larger society and where many women seek to become more like patriarchal men. Rather than communities supporting all families as needed we are divided into haves and have-nots with a privileged group of ethno-religious (or ethno-philosophical) puritans, violent men and money-chasers destroying natural and human resources through vain glory displays of consumption and millennia of wars fueled by traditional hatreds and misuse of power-over-others.

Just as larger societies can be unsustainable, our families can be unsustainable when one or both parents do not love each other and their children in daily actions. It is in this hard reality that I see negative consequences carry through, creating harsh poetic justice like Shakespearean tragedies where parents suffer the consequences of our mistakes, whether we consciously recognize our culpability or not.

In my own experience, I have witnessed the evolution of intergenerational abusive families that, as time passed, turned out to be unsustainable, much to everyone’s suffering. In one family, the children of an abusive puritan Grandmother were abused in their marriages or became abusive. Another child died young. As her children’s abusive families went through tragedy and upheaval, including addictions, injuries, physical and mental illnesses and early deaths, she continued to play games, pitting her abused daughter against her abusive son.

Marriages broke up. Families frayed and became estranged. All of her children and three grandchildren died before her. Though she remained unrepentant of the harm she had done, her family life was filled with suffering and she, too, eventually suffered greatly. The surviving families splintered into physically and emotionally distant units, connected only by their DNA.

In other instances, heavy-handed puritan parents had children who defiantly and unrepentantly rebelled through decades of alcoholism and addictions, causing their parents to suffer and, in some cases, experience the ultimate revenge of dying with the belief that their unrepentant children would be condemned by their deity. In the same way, I’ve witnessed children of abusive thinkers or addicted partiers repeat the chaos of their childhood and then react into sober puritanism, causing their parents to suffer through estrangement and accusations of ungodliness from their children. The cultural icons of our societies—puritan religion verses skeptical thinkers and wild partiers—are weapons in these families’ internal wars against each other, much to everyone’s loss.

Since I am a stepfather in a family culture very different from my original one, I’ve learned what works in my original family can be counterproductive in my chosen one. I can say that I can’t count all the mistake’s I’ve made as a partner and stepfather because I have yet to stop making them. All I have to offer is my love for our family and my new learning each day.

In addition to our own failings, when we see other family members failing the family, there are limits to what can be done. Knowing that in a family what goes around comes around with a great power, I receive both a faith that conscientious, thoughtful love will return and a warning that whatever mistakes are made will also return.

Of all the webs of life where what goes around comes around, it is in the family that this principle is most evident. Narcissists and abusers may try to use their egos to callous themselves to others, but they still suffer the consequences of their actions with their families. In the personal world, words are rarely necessary. Events around us speak their truth without us needing to comment.

My dear mother-in-law, who I knew as a model of serenity, quiet devotion and joy, probably understood this dynamic more than most others I have known. Her simple faith made her a joy to be with; her many years in our home are fondly remembered by all. In times of trouble and joy—which almost always happen together—emulating her faith in conscientious love is a high peak for a skeptical thinker like me to climb.

As spring begins, many early flowers are blooming in yards and on hillsides: Yellow and purple Crocuses, blue and purple miniature irises, pale purple periwinkle and lemony yellow and eggshell white Daffodils are all heralding the slowly warming Earth. Ramp sprouts are appearing among the fallen leaves covering the ground and I hear, as I do each March, the throaty rasp of Redwing Blackbirds near the small waterway running along the side of our hollow. Despite lows in the 20's for several nights, in our garden the first Arugula seeds are sprouting, reawakening with the Earth from the cold darkness of the dormant season. Using old sheets, we cover the garden bed most nights to protect the fragile seedlings as they begin new life.

This year, as we have in the last few years, we will add over a thousand pounds of compost and manure to the garden to strengthen the soil that our seeds depend on. When we began the garden about ten years ago, we discovered that the clayish soil contained buried bottles, broken plates and other trash thrown out decades before. Our first harvests were poor, but as we added manure, compost, leaves and other organic fertilizers, our harvests improved.

Our Saint Patrick’s Day tradition with our friend happened the Friday before the actual holiday due to a schedule conflict. As we drank beer and listened to Irish music, our friend, my wife and I talked about what the “American Dream” had meant to her family and community, as opposed to my understanding of it. The phrase, so commonly used in our culture, has a very different meaning to our friend than to me. For our friend, the dream is one of community and unity made possible by the rewards of hard work; from my viewpoint, many who pursue the dream emphasize wealth at the cost of community. We agreed to meet again, so I could hear more about her experience growing up in an ethnic working class community.

The violent men-money-chasers-puritans I work with practice good works in their communities as my wife and I try to, though some of them are hostile to outsiders and disregard the Feminine. As a result, they live in communities that both support them within it, but which are at odds with other communities of violent men-money-chasers-puritans of other religions, nationalities, and so forth. Living my childhood as an outsider and scapegoat in a community like this taught me the importance of building both community and inclusion.

As we have gotten older, my wife and I have watched people around us building or damaging the webs of life around them. In some cases, men have abandoned their wives or girlfriends in affairs with younger women, only to end up alone and lonely in their later years. Other people have been affected by addictions or other problems, creating hardship. The strands of life around these people and their families have been broken or weakened, making a more difficult life for them and their children. While the intolerance of puritan communities can create conflict, the lesson of practicing good works within our community is an essential one. This is especially important for the children and grandchildren of my generation, who will live in a human world that they will inherit from us.

Like looking at the soil where we sow our early spring seed, looking at the strength of a web of life is an omen of the strength of the people in it when long-term crises arise. Renewing inclusive, supportive communities and the fertility of our Earth is an essential practice. In doing so we are undoing the harm of previous generations, both to the Earth and to humanity.

For most of us, these challenges exist within our own families and communities and the Earth around us; our stories are the stories of history slowly unfolding. Choices by our elders to work through issues—to overcome addictions, to work through anger issues, to release racial and gender privileges, to provide a stable home for our partners and family—were crucial to our lives. Failures of our elders to work through these same issues often means that we are faced with overcoming them within ourselves; our failures are likewise passed on to future generations.

As I learned the inter-generational stories of families, it was sometimes possible to foresee trials and hardships years before they would arise. I sometimes imagine elder spirits watching us as our lives unfold and thinking, “I will check in with this person in two or three years, when a crisis will force him to choose between repeating the mistakes of his elders or finding a new path for himself. Until then, I can see all will continue as it has.”

My wife’s frequent babysitting and caring for others in our family and community and my volunteer work are attempts to strengthen our soul cluster just as compost strengthens our garden. Perhaps, if I live past the doorway of my own death, I will pass into a happier, stronger web of life than when I was a child—but that is not so important. What is important is that our actions, combined with the positive works of our generation, will strengthen our family, community and Earthly webs of life for my stepchildren and all the young people around them. On days that I am weary, it is easy to worry that this cannot be attained by good works; on days when I take part in the seasonal miracle of life arising from the still wintry Earth, I have faith that the strength of good works can overcome the mistakes of my generation.

The season has been unusually hot for late spring and rainy, so lettuce has been growing rapidly, filling our refrigerator and rows at the produce auction. Arugula and Spinach have bolted, flowered and begun to set seed, which I will gather for next year once the plant has died. Mushrooms have been growing, providing the basis for soups and omelets. Using dead leaves from last fall, I have covered some of the area between the rows in our garden, acting as a weed barrier, a fertilizer and a way to retain moisture.

The produce auction itself has been active, but with unpredictable results. Our first auction for the club saw above-market prices for strawberries and asparagus and our buyer—an experience and crafty bidder—made the difficult decision to walk away with nothing, cancel the delivery for that night, and to add a later auction to our schedule. Following that, I went to a sparsely attended auction with an abundance of early crops and bought many strawberries for less than half the price at the market. It was the luck of the draw, and I know that I would have not been as wise as the buyer who walked away empty handed, but left our season’s budget in good shape.

Watching the woods, buying produce at the auction, natural gardening and harvesting wild crops like mushrooms has given me first-hand experience with how nature adapts to death. When I first began to sit in the woods and watch, I noticed how woodpeckers used dead limbs and trees as homes. I also saw that trees and other plants were constantly making the soil more fertile for future lives. As leaves and limbs fell and trees died and fell to the Earth, the work of their lives left a legacy that would make the ground more fertile for the generations that would follow them. Their lives were more than sustainable—they actually enhanced the future for their offspring.

I also saw that life came from death, creating an afterlife that was unpredictable but important. Mushrooms grew on dead wood, turning the death of trees into opportunities to grow new life and to help the process of enriching the soil. The trees themselves did not magically reincarnate from their own rotting carcasses, but rather sacrificed their physical bodies in death to provide nutrition to bugs, mushrooms, and other life living off their death. In turn, these entities would turn the rotting corpse of the tree into richer, more fertile soil from which new lives—including perhaps the grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren of the trees would flourish. I learned more from the wisdom of trees and of the Earth than any human teacher, and my human teachers have been brilliant lights.

As I grow older, I consider more and more my own legacy and what I can do to provide a better future for my family and community. This includes attending financial seminars by money-chasers who help me plan an economic future for me and my family. In a recent seminar, a money-chaser listed a series of economic challenges and approaches to life, ending with leaving a legacy after death. A virtue of money-chasers is that many consider what impact they want to have on the children, their community, and the larger world after they pass on; a failure of many money-chasers is that they only consider their economic impact, or seek to control others with that wealth.

A challenge for many sensitive people, such as artists and activists, is that we are often so burdened by seeking to live in a human culture that is at odds with our inner selves that we do not consider our impact and legacy on those we love the most—our children, our dear friends, and our community. We may spend many hours and a lot of what wealth we have to make the larger world a better place, to take part in consciousness-raising events, to protest the hardness of the money-chaser-violent-man-puritan culture that runs the larger human world, and to help make the ecological future better.

A sensitive person will suffer at the thought of the harm that money-chasers and violent-men do to the larger human world, with rampant pollution, the perpetuation of traditional hatreds and injustice, and the oppression of innocents. A money-chaser will complain that many sensitive people live only for today economically and do not consider our legacy in economic terms. In my own case, I would never have considered the economic impact I would have on my family and community had I not developed schizophrenia and retrained in computer work to get off disability. I would have pursued a much less materialistic life, especially had I not joined with my wife and her family. The middle ground of responsible economic living has much to learn from money-chasers and activists and sensitive people.

As part of my work with our food club, I attended a meeting that featured solar enterprise entrepreneurs and activists, who are seeking to find that middle ground. The keynote speaker was a woman who had, with her husband, started a solar business, helped create a green energy credit union and an investment organization to help fund and foster renewable energy. The merger of economic and ecological insight was inspiring, especially compared to the bitter greed of some of the money-chasers I work with, who both seek wealth in the vain attempt to find happiness and are miserable in living lives out of touch with the spiritual values of affirming life, family and community.

I sincerely believe that while these money-chasing puritan violent-men consciously believe that they are pursuing a life blessed by their deity, that their bitterness comes from unconsciously knowing that by doing harm to attain wealth they cannot “buy happiness.” For all their hard work, their happiness can only last as long as their purchases and attainments can salve their inner pain. Unless they can escape their materialistic, money-first mindset, they will never know peace, bliss or lasting happiness.

It is not easy to face the difficulty that lies ahead, or to try to find a balance between the greed of money-chasers and the economic poverty of activists and sensitive people. In my own case, being forced to find some compromises between the two extremes has been a very fortunate gift I received in the aftermath of my psychosis. However, that balance—essentially how we can care for ourselves and our families and communities while enriching the future of the Earth and future generations—is the essence of the challenge of our historical moment. For the answer, I always feel that turning to the Earth’s wisdom of life adapting to death is the deepest, most potent source of insight.

As mid-summer is passing, the season continues to be rainy. While some growers have been affected and sweet corn is still sparse at the Farmer’s Market, local growers appear to be resilient in the face of the challenging weather. Meanwhile, our garden has been flourishing, with harvests of beets with luxuriant greens, dark green Heirloom Lacinato kale and elephant garlic. At the same time, the produce auction has been abundant and between our garden and food from the club, our refrigerator has been filled to capacity. We’ve made a half dozen or more dishes in the last ten days--Ratatouille, Pinto Bean and Beet Green soup, Potato Salad, Cucumber-Tomato Sandwiches, Peach Tart, and Sweet Corn, plus Kale and Romaine salads—all using ingredients almost entirely from local sources.

We are freezing and preserving the abundant extras, including blueberries, extra soup, Korean-style Kim Chi, and Kale leaves for winter soups and looking forward to additional dishes—Beets, Greens and Onions with Tofu and Turnip, Greens, and Mushroom stir-fries, Borscht, and many other seasonal dishes.

Bright red Bee Balm mixed with white Queen Anne’s Lace, pale purple Coneflowers and coral-pink Swamp Milkweed in the waterway down the hill have begun to flower, bringing hummingbirds and butterflies. Pinkish Hollyhocks and Golden Coreopsis are continuing to bloom, all of which provide food to insects and birds in partnerships of life. The Earthly River of Life flows together in natural communities through generations, and in our area reaches an abundance in summer like few other times of the year.

Our good fortune in terms of healthy, abundance sources of local food cannot be measured. In a world where hunger, malnutrition, poverty and curable diseases run rampant, the abundance of the Earth around us gives the chance for a healthy and sensually satisfying life. The challenge is to provide this same abundance in a sustainable way for our family and community.

Part of this is to embrace the new generation of young lives that younger women in our family and community have brought forth, providing new hope in the face of our own aging lives. My wife, after losing our beloved mother-in-law, has fully embraced the new lives through babysitting several times a week, including for a boisterous baby in our family.

We had a family gathering recently where the eight-month-old girl was a delightful center of the time together. My wife and I brought potato salad and kale salad and made veggie burgers, with the meal timed with a brief nap for the toddler. Toward the end of the meal, the baby awoke and cried out for company.

The father brought her to the table and we watched her as she fully woke. She became lively and despite her young age began to move about, so we went to the living room where she crawled and walked around a coffee table, waving her hands, seeming to dance to music, beating the table with a hand and excitedly calling out with delight as the family watched her every move. For over three hours she delighted the young parents, her uncle and my wife and I, merely by being a young, beloved life learning to move about on her own. She herself was full of vigor and joy, exuberant in the love of life and the new abilities of her growing body. Seeing the child’s growth from a newborn only eight months ago into zestful, joyful and strong child as part of the sacred flow of Earthly life into eternity has been one of the most profound, joyous experiences of our family’s life.

After the gathering, my wife and I reflected on the wonderful day and I said that in my family babies of that age were set aside in playpens and cribs during family gatherings. Rather than spending three hours being entertained and delighted by the new lives, they were put out of the way while the adults—particularly the men—discussed their outer world focus. In my family, it would be news, politics, philosophy, education, business plans and sports as the main topics, all of which were seen as more important than “child’s play.” Yet, many of these outer world, patriarchal centers do little to move forward the sacred Earthly river of life and some make our families and communities less sustainable, damaging the future of the young lives who are—tragically—not the focus of our daily lives.

In our contemporary, patriarchal consciousness, we are trained to focus our attention away from the river of life that flows through our lives and onto temporary attainments—business, military, political, media and artistic successes; accumulating money, gaining power-over-others, becoming better known—much to our long-term loss. Part of the greatest challenge of our culture is that it is at best irrelevant to the needs of sustaining the Earthly river of life of family, community and Earth around us; at worst, it harms that sacred flow into eternity, moving us away from the joys that radiate from that center.

Whether one has children or not, there are many ways people contribute to the flow of life through eternity. Activists, community volunteers, good neighbors, child-care workers, philanthropists, healers, growers, and many others whose lives directly support a sustainable flow of Earthly life practice the essence of good works—to bring forth life in daily activity. This constant labor of life—which is oftentimes ignored yet given hollow, insincere praise by patriarchal leaders—is a center of the flow of life through eternity.

In a very real way, my own journey back to this wonderful center began when, in first seeking to practice feminism rather than claim to follow it, I began to help my Mom and Grandmother with holiday meals. I quickly discovered while oftentimes lazy men in the living room watched TV and pontificated on the way that the world should be, the women in the kitchen were sharing stories, catching up on family life, recalling family and community history and deepening their relationships while cooking a meal to feed our family. These first few ventures into the woman’s world began a decades-long quest toward that center of life that is the toddler walking around a table, exploring her growing abilities in her new world and delighting her family with the joy of abundant life. It is a journey of joy and love, still far from completion, towards a more sustainable family and community at peace with the human world.

As the daylight increases, the warming Earth is bringing forth early spring flowers. Purple and white crocuses, pale blue periwinkle, golden yellow and eggshell white Daffodils, and lemony Forsythia are providing beauty in the midst of the still cold and dark season. While the human world is in the throes of an unforeseen and all-engulfing crisis, the Earth continues the annual cycle of seasonal life, untouched by the worries of the human world.

For decades, people in the circles I’ve traveled in have mentioned the inevitability of a new pandemic, worrying that the widespread use of antibiotics would evolve a superbug, untreatable by current medical knowledge. Others, unimpressed by claims that the human world had conquered the Earth and made it bow to the human god, worried that history’s lesson that plagues arise without warning would be ignored because of the widespread belief that humanity had overcome the challenges of all-encompassing Earth.

Coming into the local foods movement decades after it had taken a foothold in my community, I quickly became aware that it was preparing for times when our international supply of luxurious foods would be interrupted. Most people in my community, confident in the intricate vulnerability of industrial abundance, never consider if the food we consume is from the neighboring county or another hemisphere. As long as the complex and narrow supply chains bringing fruit from Chile or Hawaii and olive oil from Italy remain intact, the source is unimportant.

When I was drawn into the local food movement by high gasoline prices in 2008, I quickly learned how vulnerable my community was. Activists working towards sustainability and resiliency pointed out that our stores only had a supply of three days of food on the shelves and that our county’s food production could not feed our population. We were, in our ignorance, vulnerable to any crisis that would interrupt these world-wide supply chains providing an abundance of foods to our privileged communities. Among the many threats to our delicately maintained abundance, the likelihood of a pandemic was commonly discussed in the local food movement.

As the United States woke to a world-wide crisis that had dominated the world press for weeks, I found myself waking up as if from a deep sleep to the cause that had taken over my life more than a decade before. The food club we had developed over the last ten years and my hobby of gardening had brought me into the local and bulk food movements in my community, preparing me for the challenge we are currently facing.

One announcement followed another revealing that our sleepy ignorance had left our society unprepared for the rapidly increasing crisis. One after another organization announced changes or cancellations. The university I work at raced to implement plans for an all-online and remote coursework, community groups, ranging from spiritual to self-help to entertainment to restaurants announced closures. My own family cancelled plans for a family reunion meal.

Meeting with another local activist on our food club, I was reminded of the value of the networks the club had developed in our community. I realized that while the rest of the community was shutting down, we had the opportunity to help. I called our bulk food supplier the next day and asked him if their supply chains had been disrupted.

“No yet,” he replied, “But we are expecting them to be.”

Later that day I sent out an email to our club, letting members know that local food activists had been preparing for situations like these. This was followed quickly by order forms for rice, flour, sugar, cooking oils and other staples that my area cannot produce our own. Within three days, there were orders for as twice as much as we normally order in two months.

For our own resources, my wife and I made several trips to grocers, supplementing our stores of food from local sources and choosing a balanced selection of foods to deal with a long-term interruption of our supply chains. Following discussions with local food activists, I selected products that are from distant sources that are likely to become costly or scarce.

I’ve watched as top leadership have shifted from denial to sudden recognition that a devastating wave of death may soon engulf us. As dire predictions mount, I’ve reflected on what has been the carefully maintained denial by many in the United States. It is easy to believe what I wish if I avoid contradictory facts. If it served me, I could say that Moscow does not exist and unless I am taken there against my will I can reject any evidence as deception. On the other hand, I cannot act on the belief that I do not need food or water. Physical need cuts through denial.

For over a generation, most people living in the United States have not faced physical hardships that challenge cherished beliefs, leading to a culture out of touch with the essentials of life. The physical reality of a pandemics and living through waves of deaths are likely to break through these delusional walls in the same way that a decade ago losses in war and an economic downturn caused the last Republican president and his family to lose political power-over-others.

The covenant of bad works, which allows leaders to temporarily—and only temporarily—escape from natural justice, breeds incompetence, cruelty and narcissism. As a result, crises erupt as slowly evolving consequences created by the Earth and humanity respond to the quick, short-lived force of power-over. The suffering this causes breaks people out of their shells of denial and they reject the delusions they had about their hero, finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes.

Considering the likely political outcome of this crisis, I thought of a simple “equation”: Trump = W. The two individuals are twin tips of an iceberg of the same large hierarchy of white violent men, money-chasers and puritans. Hierarchies like these dominate the societies of most nations, living out the same story retold over the millennia of patriarchies: They ruthlessly gain power-over others, bring about suffering and injustice while ignoring real challenges until a crisis cause them to fall unexpectedly. It is a story of the larger human world that is witnessed, recounted, ignored and witnessed again. But it is not an indictment of a few very power-overful men; it is a measure by which money-chasers, violent men and puritans blame problems on the leaders they choose, rather than the lifestyle and goals that cause them to choose those leaders.

While the crisis in the larger human world grew, in our small and unimportant lives my wife and I sowed our garden under dark skies, as we have during spring for over a decade. Turning over the soil, adding compost and manure, and planting lettuces, arugula, mustard, spinach, kale, beets, carrots, turnips, onions and peas, we quietly took part in the cycle of life and renewal. The feel of cool, wet soil on my hands as we planted precious food gave me comfort and joy. While the human world careens into chaos and crisis, the simple acts of bringing forth life give both our bodies and our spirits strength. The hardships of the mortal world bring on threats and worries, but being embedded in the Earthly river of life gives practical meaning to each and every day. In two months our garden will be providing us life-giving food each day—a precious gift of the Earthly flow of life into eternity.

As the sun approached its apex in the northern sky, waves of very hot global warming days, separated by times of more seasonal temperatures, provided an early start of the summer’s heat. Paired with frequent downpours, the season of abundance began with a flurry of growth. In past winters, with snow on the ground, I have repeatedly told our granddaughter that “the Earth has gone asleep” to have “a long winter’s nap.” In the spring, I told her that “the Earth is waking up” and we are receiving “early gifts of strawberries and asparagus” from that source.

Now, as flowers bloom and the fields and gardens provide us with abundant food, I tell her “The Earth has awakened and is giving us many gifts.” Pink early Lilies, bright yellow Stella d’Ora and Coreopsis, vibrant orange Day Lilies, and fiery Chinese Red Lilies mixed with deep-hued red Bee Balm have followed one after another in the progression of days. The red Lilies, a gift of my hard-bitten, colorblind brother to my silently self-victimizing Mom were salvaged from her yard after she passed, only a couple of years prior to my brother’s passing, serving me as a reminder in this season that love can be expressed so subtly behind the defensive masks we wear that it is sometimes only visible in the reflection of our shared pasts.

June has provided many gifts from the Earth, including an ongoing abundance of Asparagus, Lettuces, Sylvetta Arugula, Kale, Turnip Greens, early Tomatoes, and many other foods, including a surprise of a robust and perfectly shaped Chicken of the Woods mushroom. The season has provided numerous salads, Udon Noodles with Tofu and Arugula, frequent servings of Asparagus as a side dish and in Quiches and other main courses, Turnips, Mushrooms, and Turnip Greens stir fry, Potato and Beet Salad, Peas and Cauliflower Masala, and Hungarian Mushroom Soup. The gifts of the season’s abundance, likely to continue into the peaks of mid-summer and the harvests of fall, begins a luxurious time of our daily lives.

This has been the first year of full harvest from our Asparagus patch, which I set in with my stepson three years ago. Last year I ceased the harvest at 40 large stalks to preserve the patch’s growth in anticipation of this year, a gift my younger self gave to this year’s harvest. The abundance of this year’s harvest has surprised me, beginning in mid-April, and ceasing in mid-June—though more would have been possible—and gave us over 160 large stalks, with another 15 taken by deer.

In his victory garden book, A Manual of Home Vegetable Gardening, Francis Coulter wrote, “When a gardener cuts the first substantial asparagus stalks of his own planting and growing he may be said to have graduated in the art of vegetable cultivation. He has shown his skill and demonstrated that his interest is not the fleeting enthusiasm of a single season but is supported by the patience of all true gardeners, so that he is content to work for a deferred reward and looks forward to producing for many years one of the finer luxuries of the table” (pp. 84-85).

For me, I just wanted to supply my family with produce that they all loved. A byproduct of this has been a lesson in sustainability, reflecting the intelligence of squirrels who have for eons sown gifts of forests of nut trees for their descendants. At the same time, patriarchy’s urban god-kings have veered humanity into an unsustainable lifestyle while flattering ourselves as brilliant compared to the tiny-brained squirrel’s stewardship.

The beginning of season of abundance has been paired with my annual life reflection and atonement for my failures in the past year. This year I reread notes from the reflections of the years since 2015, when I began the practice. Reading the reflections were interesting in that many of the challenges I spoke of and feared seven years ago have changed, been met, or passed through losses, such as the passing of my dear mother-in-law a week after the passing of her beloved and only sibling. Yet, for the profound losses, our family and community has received the mysterious gifts of abundance and growth, largely moving on from the challenges and worries that haunted my mind.

I noticed that challenges appeared, fell into crises, and prompted us into action. This time-immemorial approach of humanity—to avoid sowing gardens until hunger threatens and ignore threats to the essential needs of life until we cannot sustain ourselves much longer—threatens us individually and collectively. It is the profound, mysterious, and somewhat random luck given to our family for many years that our challenges have largely been resolved. Seeking to reflect on this past, I looked at the events of past years and my role in them.

After reflection, I came to the surprising but not-so-surprising recognition that central to my failures in the past has been a lack of self-assertion when it was needed. To gently, but consistently, advocate for my family and our needs, as I did in fits and sometimes temperamental piques in the past. While I did attempt this, there have been times I failed miserably, making difficult situations worse or failing to achieve what my family needed.

My wife has said that in the marriages she feels are best the women are strong-willed and outspoken and the men are milder that most men. I see this a little differently, harkening back to the early years of my relationship with my wife, during which I learned a lot about what was needed from me to support a strong and loving family, setting aside the crude and self-obsessed pursuits of my younger self. Reflecting on this with another family man, he and considered our transformation from youthful, self-centered, and sometimes impetus men seeking to “take the world by storm” and being drawn through our desires for companionship, love, and sex to mature into men who seek to be helpmates to our lifelong partner and the family and friends that came to surround that center.

In fact, I do not view myself as mild per se. Rather, I seek to be extremely passionate and persistent, using the resources we have while avoiding bluster and fits—if I can control my temper—and sustain a life around my family and community that builds the future of our lives. My challenge is to assert myself in the way that a squirrel grows an abundant forest for her descendants, providing them a gift of stewardship and the habits and resources to sustain them for eons in the joyous Earthly river of life flowing into eternity.