I often ponder the question, "Why do I garden?" It seems as if some unknown wiring in my being drives me to the dirt. It must be sated, and as soon as I see seedlings emerge, it is fed. There is a profound sense of peace that satisfies me fully when I participate in this primordial ritual of planting, tending, harvesting, and saving.

I sense a deep and moving need in people to do something meaningful in these days of chaos and uncertainty, so they garden. To garden is to create, to create beauty, sustenance, order and life. To garden gives us a different sense of time, one that is embedded in our genes but rarely reflected in our fast-paced culture. To garden is to enjoy communion with a "greater power."

I envision a future where more and more people plant food and medicine around them because they know what they really need in this life and want to provide for themselves. I am relieved when I see fruit trees, flowers, and vegetable gardens slowly pushing back the lawn in my neighbors’ yards. First introduced in France as a way of displaying wealth and making a dramatic statement that the landowner does not have to grow food, lawns, the largest agricultural crop in America, use more pesticides and herbicides than any other, a distant echo from the past.

I grew up in a gardening family. Truth is, I have never been without a garden. Even as a commercial fisherwoman in Alaska, I had jars of sprouts on the boat to tend. I have come to a clear understanding that food is medicine and herbs hold a distinct place in our lives; they can prevent ill health as well as cure it. When people lose access to whole food, disease is natural. Today, there is disease of the body/land, mind/air, and heart/water; there is neglect and abuse of the free fire bestowed on our planet daily from the sun. Reconnection with the sacred in our earthly pursuits would go a long way to relieve planetary suffering.

Gardening brings focus to the reality that we are not only what we eat. Gardening helps us see that what we eat, what keeps us warm, what shelters us, is of great importance. We might do well to focus our attention on what is happening in these areas of life directly around us. We are all charged with the occupation of "gardener/steward." It is our job to cultivate life, and our collective choices determine how well we are doing.

For a while, there was a belief that the new god technology could control the elements and make them bend to our desires, but each day more data shows us otherwise: simple, personal data like our power, water, and food bills, and more elusive data like polar icecaps melting (only seems to affect you if you’re a polar bear or happen to have a farm on low land in Great Britain where the sea walls are collapsing). We entrusted others to do right by us, but doing right and profit collided, leaving a large bill to be paid. It is a deficit not only of money, but a loss of the very threads that weave us together as human beings connected to the earth.

A simpler approach may be in order these days: an inclusive approach that invites everyone to use what is at hand to create an abundant future, to see the world and each other as whole and to work from that place. If everything we need is already here, why ship anything halfway around the planet? If everything we need is here but we no longer have access to it or a say in how it is cared for, what then? "What can I do?" people often ask.

A while back I spoke at a conference entitled "Farm to Table: Growing Healthy Foodsheds and Community." (A foodshed is a local, sustainable food system.) The speakers were rural sociologists, urban chefs, farmers, gardeners, and extension agents working in "alternative" agriculture, comprising a very informed and articulate body of wisdom from across America. All were involved in the alternative food "scene" for the last twenty years, and all concurred that the word "organic" had been co-opted and no longer defined a way of growing or caring for food or the land that met their ideals or nourished their values. There was great deliberation about what word we could use to replace "organic," a word that would convey to people the deeper values we all shared. The one word that everyone moved toward was "local." If the bulk of our food were grown locally, we could:

• use less fossil fuel (each bite you eat travels an average 1,300 miles or more);

• enliven our landscapes by supporting small farms rather than gravel pits, strip malls, and shopping centers (designed around cars, not people);

• have a genuine sense of food security; and probably most importantly of all,

• develop a sense of an interconnected rural/urban community.

Community is the key element to a healthy future. When a community defines itself as caring for the earth, caring for the future, sharing values and expressing them in real time and real life, what we see around us will change. To re-link ourselves with the land where we live may be the greatest action we can take for our immediate health and that of future generations. To regain our center, reconnect with our neighbors, and build nuclei of support that radiates our belief in the sacredness of the earth and each other is to ferment a bubbling brew of possibility.

One memorable speaker at the conference was Michael Ableman. He has farmed near Santa Barbara for two decades. His twenty-acre vegetable farm began in a neighborhood of small nut and fruit orchards and is now surrounded by the great American dream/nightmare, housing developments and strip malls. A few years ago the pressure of developers was so extreme that he made a plea to his supporters to buy the development rights so the farm could survive. They did, and today, he runs his diesel tractor with the used vegetable oil from the local MacDonald’s fryer vat! A center for the development of urban agriculture has been established on the farm. Farm workers are paid a decent living wage and are not exposed to herbicide or pesticide dangers on the job. Who could have imagined that! What might happen in our neck of the woods?

For more inspiration and possibilities for stimulating imagination outside the box, I recommend the following books:

This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Jean Dye Gussow. A delightful read that gently exposes the dangers in our food system and superbly captures the pleasures and challenges of growing one’s own food, interwoven with life and the building of a new home.

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. Mr. Nabhan has done more to open my eyes to the threads that hold us to our humanity and to the earth than any other contemporary writer has. Several years ago, I took a trip to the Southwest desert and, of course, wanted to harvest herbs to which I didn’t normally have access. In a small gift shop in a deserted gold mining town, I found a book called Gathering the Desert. I thought I had gotten the book to help me succeed in my quest. I had, only my deeper quest was quite different than the one I thought I was on. Gary Paul Nabhan introduced me intimately and genuinely to 12 plants of the desert. Through those short essays, I was given insight into how plants and humans evolved together in the desert. I was forever changed, as was the way I teach herbalism to anyone willing to slow down and listen to the plants.

In Coming Home to Eat, Mr. Nabhan explores his foodshed in a yearlong ritual of growing, gathering, fishing, and hunting food within 200 miles of his home. In that year, his travels take him from the mountains north of Tucson down the Rio Colorado river to the Gulf of Mexico; from Decatur, Iowa and Seed-Savers Exchange to the hallowed halls of Washington, D.C. to speak for the Monarch butterfly in the face of biotech’s threat to wildlife through corn treated with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). An ethnobotanist, founding member of Native Seeds/SEARCH, and an entomologist, Gary Paul Nabhan has a unique perspective on plants and humanity that shines through in Coming Home to Eat. It’s a quick and easy read, even with the weighty subject matter. If you’re wondering what it means to eat from your foodshed, this book is a must-read.

The last book that will most likely change the way you see yourself and what it means to be part of the bio-family of earth is Stephen Harrod Buhner’s The Lost Language of Plant: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth. A well-written exposé of the tragic effects of the release of antibiotics and other silver bullets of technological medicine into the environment and why plant medicine is of great import to our future on this planet. Stephen is a man of great feeling and a wizard with words. He weaves a beautiful cloak of poetry and fact as he envisions a path that connects us to our past as we move into the future.

By gardening, we connect to the world. We become co-creators, with that "Greater Power," of beauty, culture, abundance, and possibility. We empower ourselves to create security and safety in our village. We look into each other’s eyes and touch each other’s hearts. If we aren’t cultivating the life around us, who is? A friend gave me a hand-stitched sampler that hangs on my wall; it states, "We come from the earth and we return to the earth; in between we garden."

Be well in the turning.

EagleSong, C.C.H., director of RavenCroft Garden in Monroe, Washington, is a nationally recognized herbal educator. She is dedicated to keeping herbal wisdom within reach of all people and connected to the healing wisdom of nature. P.O. Box 170, Startup, WA 98293; (360) 794-2938; ravencroft@ravencroftgarden.com. Visit RavenCroft Garden and see natural gardening in action, or take the Just Our Yards (JOY) Gardening Camp in June.

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