Tuesday, September 4, 2012

A Prayer with Arugula



The arugula was the only thing I had sown this year from my own seed: a child of last year's arugula. I had allowed the plant, past its prime, to bolt and grow tall, to go to seed—ugly and rangy in my garden bed–—and pulled each dried-up pod, carefully harvesting little plant embryos from the chaff. Putting these in an envelope sealed with faith in biology and hope, I stored them overwinter and brought them out again last spring, sprinkling them chaotically in my salad bed to start again.

Up they came, and produced their delicious shoots of rocket to be cut into salads, added to sandwiches and tossed to passing ducks, who eschewed them for their bite. In July, they bolted in the heat again and I let them do their business, making more baby arugula for years to come. It was hot and heavy in the vegetable bed; bees abuzz and flowers of other lettuces coming into bloom as I lazily let anything past its prime pass into seed. Again, I harvested the seed and put it up in envelopes for a spring to come.

Yesterday, as I went about my business in the garden, peeking under winter covers to observe the infant growth of beets, onions, greens, broccoli and carrots, I saw something in the path. Arugula had scattered its seed on the garden path and sent up shoots, now a third generation grown on my land. Like so many careless sexual creatures, this angiosperm had spent its seed outside the confines of its home. There is such a delightful imperfection to this business of sexual reproduction—the mixing of genes, the crazy tangle of DNA. It would be less messy were we all but cuttings of one larger plant—the image of God, perhaps—but how much less interesting the world!

Over time, my arugula, having grown generations on the discrete micro-climate of my yard—will select for a variety perfectly adapted to the wind, the shade and sun here; perhaps even the watering habits of its grower. Each year, I will set seed, and the best arugula will grow. The arugula that survives will live to put forth flowers and turn flowers into seeds. I will harvest those seeds and start again; each year a new generation of peppery oval leaves—great-granddaughters of those I grew before. It is hard not to feel I am presiding over something rather great.

All the religion I need, for the most part, is spoken of in that arugula. Praise Glory, Praise Glory. Hallelujah to the world. I am fully in love with and devoted to Creation. Listen, listen. The decomposers work the soil at its little green feet. The beans spin sugar out of air and make a gift of it to the soil. The calendula keep nematodes at bay. Pollinators buzz and light. Predator robins swipe a caterpillar off a branch. Nature keeps putting forth. She is spilling her gifts upon my family—larger as I learn how to work with Her ways. I sit in the sunlight laughing.

Praise Glory. Praise Glory. Praise Glory.



12 comments:

  1. This absolutely THRILLS me. You have articulated so much here, and you have honored the essence of life and science and creation's magic,though most people avoid that word.
    I really thoroughly enjoyed this. And I love arugula too. My Grandpa always grows it, so the smell of it reminds me of him. xoxo Thank you for this today!!

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    1. I love the word "creation." For me, it makes me feel like the world is creating itself and is being created, like generations of everything alive are sort of living out their drama across speeded-up time right in front of my eyes–all with awesome intricacy and purpose.

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  2. Reading this makes me want to try again for our vegetable garden before winter.

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    1. Do! I have a fall garden under hoop covers right now. It's ready to be thinned. I'm hoping we'll have beets, carrots, greens, lettuces,onions and the like into late fall. It's pretty warm and humid under that plastic.

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  3. The promiscuous arugugla is just enchanting. More so your dedication and hard work in your garden. You live your ideals in this regard and it just makes me smile, take a deep breath, and feel OK. The arugula lives on.

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    1. I do SO little work in my garden, Lou, honestly. I am a lazy gardener. Extremely, embarrassingly so. I put all this time in planning and reading seed catalogs like a teen boy reads girlie mags, I prepare beds, plant, mulch and then all I do is water, brush off an occasional bug and eat the goods. That's why permaculture appeals to me. I love design, but hate drudgery. I just try and design gardens that do all the work for me. Sometimes it works and sometimes I lose all my cucumbers and can't figure out why. Arugula is a big success for me, probably because it requires so little nurture. :)

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  4. Oh I miss the days when we had arugula from our backyard too. Man do I love those smooth green leaves! Yum.

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    1. It is such an appealing plant and so easy to grow. You always have way more of it than you need and than it just hangs out, like an old friend.

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  5. I'm not much of a gardener, but I do love the glory of nature.
    And the glory of your words.

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    1. Thanks, Jewels. One of the things I love about gardening is just that it gives me a little window into nature. One thing I want to try and force myself to do is to get more friendly with my vegetables, to begin to learn what makes them unique botanically, what they really do from a biological perspective. That sounds like uber-fun to this ecogeek.

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  6. This year, for the first time in four or five years, we had a garden. It was a jumbled up mess of stuff--not at all aesthetically pleasing to the normal eye, I'm sure. But oh, it was glorious to me and insanely productive, for the most part. There is something so elementally pleasing about sowing and harvesting and being out in the natural world.

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    1. All my gardens are as you describe and all my vegetables are sort of odd. They match me and my family and my soul. "Elementally pleasing" is right.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License