Union

I don’t like to admit that I killed a spider inside the house even though this brutal act does more to unify me with my kin than what I did next. When I picked up the dead spider there was a hair tangled up with the corpse. A hair that once hung from the head of my wife. I remember the first time she responded to what I thought to be a natural act, when I found another hair and put this into the compost bin in the kitchen above eggshells and coffee grounds. She asked me what I was doing and I tried to explain.

Yesterday at the plant sale, Kimberly gave me a jackfruit tree that she had started from seed. This tree stood over four feet tall at two years old and it is unlikely that it will ever fruit in the pot that it is in for its roots need to stretch far deeper. There are ways that we can work with this. There are different scenarios to try.

Maybe this is why most don’t see the sense in the effort. Here are the scenarios I see. In the first, you plant this jackfruit along a Southwest facing wall made of concrete with a pond in front of it. Because the tree is a seedling, you reach out to those you know in the tropical world and see whether or not there are scions available, small new growth from a jackfruit tree that does produce fruit. Then you wound the mother tree and attach this new growth. With this, a winter will still come and take away the new growth with her frost. So maybe you cover the tree and maybe you put a small heater beneath that cover. 

For the love of jackfruit.

It’s more than the taste. More than the ripening. Likely, if you feel this way, you’ve found what you do difficult to explain. You are only able to relate with what my wife calls “the geeks”. I am one of these, a proud geek who likes to play and learn and determine just what will and won’t survive, who likes to find what others have not yet found and then share this knowledge. This is the community that I did not know I meant when CRISP first started. I was thinking of the neighbors and the lots and all the people who lived around the block in the 9th Ward.

The true community in Community Research into Sustainable Permaculture are the geeks, those of us who want to see the first red leaf of a eugenia or the sprout of a white flower on the trunk of a plinia. I have seen both. I don’t know how or when this need to marvel first got a hold of me. I don’t know a word better than ineffable when I try to describe what is given from trying to imagine how all of what is growing works together and yet, many of the attempts in the research part of this are in dealing with separation, in seeing how so many parts are different.

Let me give you an example. Many plants and trees will grow readily from cuttings though some need more of a head start and certain conditions in order to put them in the best position to form new roots. They may not know the corpse of a spider or whether or not a hair continues to grow after detachment. They may not even know why their own base is predisposed to root more slowly than others.

This is where the geeks come in. We take plants like cassia and willow and button bush and know that simply putting a cut and woody stem into water will give you roots in under a month. Then we try this with strawberry guava and psidium guajava and know that the same process sometimes works with the latter. We know that by air layering, some plants have a better chance. They get a head start.

Then you get a guy like me, a guy designed to never think there is enough. I want to take dozens of cuttings from dozens of plants and try some in sand in pure darkness and others in water and some with rooting hormone and some without and I want to lay claim to knowledge that was reserved for God. I want to spread what has been given even though this will naturally spread on its own.

Maybe the reason I have always wanted to do my work in the city has less to do with people and more to do with concrete. More to do with how we might fill the space and work with the ways that we have altered what God has given. And maybe, if we get enough geeks and the time is right and we find a space with a pond and a Southwest facing concrete wall outside of City Hall, maybe, just maybe, we will plant a grafted jackfruit atop one long hair, one dead spider, and we can finally leave the rest to God.