Musings: Beliefs

The thunder rumbles, cracks, rolls on. Koko paces and pants nervously, her tongue dripping like the eaves outside as the mid-morning sky slowly brightens to a lighter shade of gray.

A virgin garden bed, freshly fluffed in the pale silver-pink of last evening's dusk, lies open to the nitrogen-fixing effects of lightning, awaiting the seeds that I will sprinkle upon it at some point this day.

It's been just nine weeks since I planted the first seeds in the first bed — one bed has grown to six, each progressively larger — and yesterday I completed one full cycle: pulling up the scraggly survivors of that original arugula crop, adding them to the compost heap, returning compost to the soil.

In the first light of day, I walk through the garden, pulling weeds as I go, checking on everyone and everything. Tiny beans hang from pink-flowered vines, cucumber tendrils reach out to the kale and must be re-directed to the trellis, daikon greens shoot out flamboyantly, encroaching on the green onions. I pull back the honohono grass and the strangling vine that snakes into the soft, fertile soil of the taro trench, re-establishing the always fluid border between wild and tended.

We humans aren't the only ones to go for the easy pickin's, sprawl, intrude on territory inhabited by others so they must struggle harder to survive.

Later, I look out my window through steady rain at my garden, go on-line, browse the news sites, feel the conflict, the polarization, recoil, and think of a recent conversation with a friend, who remarked, “People defend their beliefs like they are their children.”

It strikes me that I have an awful lot of kids; which ones are truly worthy of defending? And will any, if given an equal quantity of tending, yield a bounty equal to the plants in my garden?

The thunder rolls on.