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.