Growing Sweet Potatoes

My garden is my teacher. Her wisdom reverberates through body, heart, blood, mind and skin.

A few weeks ago I harvested this year's sweet potato crop. We just finished eating the last ones: they were so delicious. This reminded me that I never published the poem I wrote last summer about my first attempt to grow these jeweled tubers.

Oh, the joy of doing something the first time! You may have no idea what you're doing, but you have enough trust and faith and willingness to give it a go, despite the odds.

As you'll soon discover, we were less than successful with that first crop of sweet potatoes. But the harvest had a surprising message for me.

The mercy I received from that sweet potato harvest continues to soften me. I smile when I see a sweet potato, remembering that day, when I knew: everything is where it is, for reasons vaster than my mind can comprehend. What if, as the Buddhists remind us, I could widen my view, and see this interdependence? How does that soften the illusion of judgment when I forget these 10,000 threads of connection?

That is what I continue to learn, kneeling at the garden bed.

Growing Sweet Potatoes

It was the first time we'd planted sweet potatoes –
slips of flesh with eyes and fingers, tiny beings
of promise. We planted and prayed for just enough
sun, just enough wet, just enough microbe to sprout
our seeds into harvest. It rained and then
it stopped.

It stopped for one hundred days and the sun baked
the earth brown. It stayed hot and became hotter.
The plants wilted and I dreamt they cried for rain.
We decided: what do we let die? What do we save?
If the potatoes die we can buy them at the store.

But I wanted the potatoes to thrive – to create
something useful and good, something as sturdy
as a potato. So I prayed for rain. I sang to the vines.
And months later, when it rained, I stood in my yard
and let the water pour down my face – planted
like the potato, watered like the vine, open in my thirst.

Last week we dug into the warm earth searching
for pink orbs. We found five perfect potatoes
and dozens of silvery roots no thicker than a pencil.
I can't bear to throw any of them away. Six months
of toil and six months of hope that I can't let go to waste.

Who am I to say the harvest is a failure? That more
should have grown in dusty soil? Who am I to say
that I, sweet potato vine, rain and soil, humus
and hot sun, should be any more than I am now?

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With a grateful heart, Karly