The Cycle

Ice Cream Bean Cutting

In this heat I seek to sustain a jungle that provides. Green that absorbs the sun’s rays so I might keep my window open in 93 degree weather and breathe and enjoy the occasional breeze as a gift from God. Inside can be a reprieve after a morning of concentrated movement. 

There’s something to be gained by working until your clothes are soaking wet. A posthole digger and blisters from gripping. Something that feels like accomplishment when you have given the land a hundred plants that you or Too Tall Farms started from seed. 

You learn by working with the earth. You learn by doing. So that years after first growing in New Orleans you dig holes at Mystery (Akili’s school garden named by the kids) and you find spots where the soil is still wet and you know that these spots will be good for the swamp mallow. You know the moringa can take about any type of soil. Same for the pigeon pea. Same for the Mexican sunflower. 

You have read about the benefits of eating the moringa pods and have not had the experience. In chopping the pods, what you realize is they are like okra. Meaning the young and tender ones slice easily whereas the older tend to be woody. So even when you don’t know, there is part of you that does. 

Most everything you are afraid of doing you have already done. Consider this journey of growing, of quote unquote failing, of not knowing exactly what to do. You have done this before. Going to college. Playing football. Living in foreign countries. Riding a bike. Swimming so far out into the ocean that you cannot see the sand. 

Here you are. Experienced. Enough. 

You know the benefits of watching, of having many spots to witness, to see what works together, to see what likes sun, what likes to reach, and what likes to hide,  to know that not everything you plant will live.

This is the true mystery, the difference between trying to control and trying to align. In the end, everything planted returns to the earth. Even the grandest of redwoods will fall on occasion, and yet, from this trunk, saplings grow and the cycle starts over. 

And even you, 81 years from now, will return to an earth that has been healed by people just like you.