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.