It’s June, and the garden is in full swing. However, it’s been a cooler spring, and it feels — as it always does — that things aren’t happening fast enough, that the soil will just stay bare.
This year, in addition to the traditional tomatoes and zucchini and peppers (the source of my current fretting), I’ve also introduced native flowering plants into my garden patch — bee balm and black-eyed Susans. And I’ve also gone all-in on planting herbs, not only in the garden, but on my balcony: parsley, four different types of basil, rosemary, coriander, sage, oregano, mint, lavender, lemon verbena, and lemon balm. And, of course, the dill just spreads of its own accord, and the chives and thyme are firmly-rooted perennials at this point. I have a huge zip-lock bag of dill shoots I don’t know what to do with, because there’s only so much tzatziki I can make at once.
I will probably dry it in the oven and save it to turn into little spice-rack gifts for Christmas. That’s actually what I plan to do with a lot of herbs this year. When people eat the things that I grow, I sincerely believe that I’m giving them a little bit of my love and protection, embodied in plant form.
The garden also contributes to the local food bank, and each individual gardener is encouraged to make donations. So this feeling of care and protection extends not only to my family, but to the people in my community that need it the most.
Is it witchcraft? Maybe kinda. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few months about what I believe, spiritually, cosmologically, etc. And lately, the label that feels the most comfortable and accurate is that I’m an atheopagan or a naturalistic paganist. I like growing things. I like feeding people. I like talking to trees and animals as I come across them when I walk. After I finish gardening, I like to sit on one of the big rocks in the pollinator patch and feel the shade of the beech trees and breathe in and breathe in. Hell, I’m even teaching myself about tarot cards. But I still get my vaccines and wear a mask indoors and know that this universe started with the Big Bang.
I’m comfortable in the belief that those concepts — that there are numinous things we can touch and yet not fully explain, and that science is central — are not contradictory. Trees and tomatoes and photosynthesis and our pale blue dot whirling around a bigger yellow dot across the cosmos are all fucking amazing. The universe is full of billions upon billions of stars and planets. It’s full of hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and sulfur and iron and calcium and all the other elements of the periodic table. But there’s only one place that we know of right now that has life as we recognize it. This is the only place with trees and horseshoe crabs and strawberries and dinosaur fossils! Isn’t that marvelous?
Most importantly, I think my community garden plot has a lot to teach me, and that working on it is one of the best methods I have at my disposal to make the world a slightly less terrifying place. And let’s be honest: it’s just plain nice and potentially even miraculous when I can harvest a strawberry I grew myself.
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