
My garden is my teacher. The lessons she teaches me reverberate 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 sweetness of doing something the first time! You often have no idea what you're doing, but you have enough trust and faith and willingness to be a fool that you 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 crop continues to soften me. I smile when I see a sweet potato and remember 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 my suffering, the illusion that grips me in shame and self 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 goo and 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
try to save? We knew if the potatoes didn't grow
we could drive to the store and buy more. But I
wanted the potatoes to thrive. I wanted to tend
something, cover new life in shit and rot
and 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 finally rained, I stood in
my yard with the plants and let the water
pour down my face and into my skin –
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 slivery
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