Final 2021 To Repair Our Lives (In 2022)
Last Year’s Life
I knew the bedding down of two gardens last season.
The St. Mark Giving Garden is a new food access, racial justice and community healing project I was blest to help build in the Hillside Neighborhood of Duluth, MN. AThanksgiving & Closing Celebration involved St. Mark AME Church, a beautiful cross-section of community members and a wide web of partners. We blest and rested the soil for the season with song, feasting, sharing, and pressing prayers into the soil with the fall garlic cloves.
Diaspora Gardens on Madeline Island has grown my soul, family, and food to share for almost two decades. It was just Jeff and me who pressed garlic seed prayers into the ground this fall, held silence, then sang quietly.
In both places, the same simple song…
Thank you for this land, Thank you for this land
Thank you for this land, Thank you for this land
This healing, healing, healing land
This healing, healing, healing land
In both places I had the powerful solitary experience of layering compost, leaves and straw, breath, silence, and again song… Thank you for this land… All is now pressed into place with the weight of winter and snow. Beneath this, last year’s life is processed, becoming soil, nourishment, and dreaming for next season. Any toxins are converted, wintered into fertility.
I sought this same process for myself: harvests, gratitude, sharing, then stillness beneath layers of nourishment and protection — to de-compose, re-compose, dream, pray, heal, prepare for beginning anew in 2022, in the garden, in To Repair Our Lives/Dancing Our Lives offerings,
I was sure writing the Giving Garden’s Year-end Letter and Report, and receiving To Repair Our Lives/Dancing Our Lives survey responses, and the candle light of Kwanzaa and other Holy Days would help me reflect and give thanks. But the rush of deadlines and the thickening of care and chores for our animal partners in the winter freeze did not yield the needed quiet and waiting.
Then a break in the rush of normal life was imposed. An emotional call: Mom, Susie, was found on the floor early morning after returning to California. She’s alive. She needs help. Words flutter unattached: On the floor for hours... MRI... Emergency Room... Nothing known.
Decisions for 2022 dropped away for my multi-stage travel from the Island to Vallejo, CA to support this incredible 87-year-old woman of history, joy, and faith: Mama, Grandma, Great Grandma, Saint (in the lexicon of my church background). Drive time held bits of radio news, snatches of prayer, a tumble of wonderings, fear, and memories.
Call Susie 'Mama' or 'Saint', but also call her 'resilient, stubborn, and independent.' Within a few days of my arrival, my hovering and wheelchair pushing were scarcely needed. Early on, I was underemployed.
It nudged my imagination. What if I didn’t try to catch up on emails and phone meetings right away? What if I let myself just be… with Mom, with a sense of compost and straw weighted by winter to quiet my soul? What if I did so just for the couple days before my brother flew in to replace me for Mom-care?
But there was a tickle in the throat, a tiny cough, a pale pink line on the home COVID test.
Boom! I begin ten days of isolation in the upstairs game room, calling Mom by phone in the same house. “Yes, I took my morning meds and my eyedrops…” (I think she was secretly delighted to not be constantly told what she should or shouldn’t be doing by her favorite - only - daughter.)
I surface from the first couple days of fatigue and aches, grateful that I’m not in or needing a hospital bed. The words of Dr. Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail float from a virtual community reading. It is MLK Day weekend.
I realize I am finally still - held in place by the weight of COVID-19.
Dr. King’s 59 year-old words about “human progress” coming “through the tireless efforts of [those] willing to be co-workers with God…” are rich compost settling into crevices, working their way beneath the surface.
The first couple days of my isolation I cannot walk much so I lay, I pray, I remember, I give thanks - consciously letting all of these seep into my soul’s soil.
I recall a radio program from my drive. The host described how a year and a half ago the heart of nation and world was cracked open with the images of George Floyd pleading for his life, and then his public killing. She noted how we worked hard to understand and heal our history of racial violence. The host then sought to analyze the backlash of this most recent year, with many people outraged by, and afraid of, stories of racial inequity, stories depicting experiences and voices of Black, Brown, and marginalized people. The program had broken through my anxiety for Mom - how are we to become more humane, more human but through the sharing and exchange of stories spoken, danced, written, sung, played, planted? This sharing grows us, heals us, connects us.
Here in this laying still time, I reach for the gratitude that you’all - for whatever reason - during a time of backlash, chose to become community with me for a year of story and experience of a brown-skinned farming mama seeking repair. My palm presses this knowledge, this thanksgiving against my sternum, rubbing it into my heart.
Then I rub the courage, pain, and humanity of Dr. King and other justice martyrs into my heart.
And also the words of fellow garden activist Michael Chaney: "Urban farming and local food production are the latest iteration of the Civil Rights Movement."
And then the image of Jay Webb tending and loving the plants and people of George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.
And the image of Theresa planting gardens at the Clayton Jackson McGhie lynching memorial in Duluth.
I rub into my heart the work and faith of colleagues, mentors, friends - a council woman, artists, a number of ministers, activists, farmers, teachers, students, elders, youth, children, gardeners, funders/believers.
I rub into my heart the patient flexible work and love of Jeff and Farm Assistant Riley who kept Diaspora Gardens going, kept me going.
I rub in the loving strong guidance of son Trevor, the power in the struggle of son Trei, the unpredictable completely reliable love of brothers, the unflappable faith of Mama Susie and her determination to stand one floor below me… and the presence of Grandma Connies, Grandpa Vannoy, Grandmere and Grandpere.
And the sunshine, songs, bright color, green, rain, gatherings and sharing of the last season.
So much to press into my being! The thanksgiving, tears, memories, and concepts that need breaking down and pondering, the prayers - all will be whispered into every dividing cell in next season’s growth.
So I wait.
And when it’s time, the settling, mingling, transformation of these elements of last year’s life will give rise to an irresistible call to start seeds… Seeds to grow food and communal resilience and celebration. Seeds to invite people into communities to imagine and support repair. Seeds to share.
In the sharing, the holding space, the walking along side, perhaps a land - a garden - will be created and cultivated for the planting of seeds of healing, connection, and repair; for the nourishing of roots of justice, community, and life.
And we’ll bless the earth together, singing: Thank you for this land, thank you for this land
Thank you for this land, thank you for this land
This healing, healing, healing land
This healing, healing, healing land.
In the stillness and the waiting…
~ regina
