I am a dedicated list maker, a firm believer in making my values visible on the page. Alongside reminders to spend time with my banjolele and vaccinate the pigs – bliss-inducing activities in my corner of the universe – are necessary but joyless enumerations like “resubmit insurance claim,” “contact bank about account,” or “pay property tax.” These kinds of notations tense my shoulders and pull me into a scarcity mindset: Is there enough in my checking account to cover the dentist’s bill? Why must I always find new ways to make my stagnant salary go further, to cover ever-increasing expenses? National advertising and my local Costco alike push acquisition with cult-like fervor, promising products as solutions for wants and needs I do not have. As Americans, we have no choice but to live in a monied economy, and I make no claims to footloose wandering or bill-free living.
Acceptance of such a reality does not mean that I must spend my days neck deep in the consumptive consciousness that capitalism promotes. I can and do resist. I refuse to set myself in competition with every living thing. I want a safe and secure place to live, so I pay my mortgage. But even more, I want the qualities that botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer sets out as elements of a gift economy: “relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning.”[1]
To escape the money-induced claustrophobic squeeze, I turn to the world of growing things. Dirt and seeds serve up questions, extravagant and profuse: How can a seed remain dormant and then, with just the right conditions, flourish into growth? How can something so tiny hold the power to explode into such expansive life?
This journey into abundance measurably alters my physical sensations. Tense muscles relax into energetic movement; I breathe full-lung breaths and plan for possibilities, assured of room to make mistakes, to try again, to have enough to share. Both realities – the never-enough-ness and the oh-so-much-ness – exist like countries on a map, distinct regions with a taste and feel and mood all their own.
Scooping dirt releases a moist and moldy scent; I pull the aroma into my winter-dried nasal passages where it folds, thick and droopy, hinting at fecundity and decay. I select a seed packet, a simple envelope that holds the sacred source of vegetative power. I rip it open and tilt the seeds into my palm. What is it that I touch? What marvels does my one hand contain? Carefully separating just a split of dirt, I drop a couple of the exquisitely distinct seeds – shiny or matte, minuscule or enormous, smooth or oddly angled – into the cleft and settle their roof of dirt. With a sprinkling of water they are off, ready to reach, to generate the kinds of meaningful abundance that brings just the “relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning” that I so long for.[2]
It is in the country of growing things that I live, where the truth of abundance is irrefutable, where I feel the spacious gratitude of reciprocity. The generosity of plants can be counted and assessed with the mind, but I comprehend their overflow and effusiveness most effectively with my body. With plants, I am among givers. With plants, I experience the world as full and exuberant. With plants, I feel myself and all around me as powerful, bursting with potentiality.
I rarely make claims of biological essentialism; I hesitate to assert something universal about our wildly diverse human species. But I wonder at my sense of communion when I see the first shoots emerge from the tiniest of seeds. Evolving humans have depended on vegetative life for eons. Is it possible that our neurology responds to a hit of growth? When immersed in abundance and plant life and fecundity, is joy not a common human response? In this space –the melding of mind, body, and emotions – the breath of plants enfolds me and speaks of a place where meaning comes from relationships, and beauty bursts out all around. This is the space of abundance, the sovereign state to which I swear allegiance.
Just as democracy depends on the work of citizenship, a practice of growing requires time, attention, and the labor of listening. I want more than adulatory ogling of profuse greenery. I am committed to the effort, the sweat and time and thinking work of learning from plants. Barbara McClintock, winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology and maize researcher extraordinaire, embodied the principle of just such intense observation and collaborative learning. Instead of denigrating plants as passive producers, McClintock recognized the actions of plants and directed her attention to their behaviors. She cultivated a “sympathetic understanding” for maize, such that the “objects of her study [became] subjects in their own right.”[3] Through a practice of energetic listening, she discerned complex genetic processes that both furthered the cause of science and brought her into intimate relationship with the plants she studied. Her “feeling for the organism” enabled insights that others simply could not see.[4]
These sorts of efforts require intention. It is not possible to arrive at growth and bounty without hard work, a nod to planning, and reflection and assessment about all creatures – plant, animal, bug, and bird – within one’s care. But I so easily jump to the mindset of corporate efficiency, ready to chart hours and productivity and return on investment. How insidious is the tentacular reach of consumptive capitalism! Why do I assume that hard work necessitates the repetition of a factory job, or the numbing confinement of hourly labor?
Even amid wide acclaim as an unquestionably dedicated researcher, McClintock demonstrated a particular method that avoided mechanization and allowed creativity to flourish. McClintock’s “respect for the unfathomable workings of the mind was matched by her regard for the complex workings of the plant…She was confident that, with due attentiveness, she could trust the intuitions the one produced of the other.”[5] Intentional cohabiting, human with plant, put McClintock’s perspicacious powers of observation into a place where care, listening, and time alchemized to generate transformative scientific knowledge. This kind of learning merges mind with body with senses and delivers connection and insight.
My current list of projects includes incorporating new chicks and goslings into the existing Patch ecosystem. As I write, there are seven little fluffs of chicken life wandering beneath the heat lamp in my front entry. All joking about chicken intellect aside, can I listen to and learn from them? As a start, I must spend time with them, hold them, observe them, think into their collective chicken mind. When the goslings arrive, I must do likewise, considering not only their caloric and nutritional needs, but their desire to paddle in the irrigation ditch, to express their essential goose-ness.
How silly it all is! But also, how bounteous and extravagant. While I thin seedling shoots, bend over trays of starts, gentle Bieledorfer chicks, and tend teenage geese, I reside in the land of Oh-So-Much. That desolate territory of Never-Enough can recede, diminish in importance, and make only limited appearances on my lists. I will perform the necessary duties to the dollar, but in my body, in my senses, in my being, I will cultivate McClintock’s “feeling for the organism,” holding firm to just the kind of return on investment – relationship, purpose, beauty, and meaning – that lights up my days and transforms a listing of tasks into a sensorial landscape of abundance.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022.
[2] Kimmerer, 2022.
[3] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock , W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983, p. 200.
[4] Fox Keller, 1983, p. 198.
[5] Fox Keller, 1983, pp. 104-105.
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