The ripple & the rooting
And other notes on sharpening the hoe of resistance
I’m sitting at my desk dutifully typing, but where I want to be is out in the yard, watching “the ripple” flow across the landscape. You know, the spring ripple, where it seems like every time the breeze blows, a different color washes over the view.
The crabapples are glorious—and darn! just that quick they’re gone, but here come the redbuds and, yes, the dogwoods right behind them. The fragrant viburnums tossing their bright mop heads high above my brow—weren’t they hard rufous spheres just yesterday? Look, there’s a shiver of sea green traveling up the azaleas and the blueberries are all in feathered bloom. Down by my shins, the alliums are forming tight fists; the one I’m stepping over blooms like a sparkler exploding—from the looks of it, it won’t be long either.
And all this serenely unfolds against the chaos and creation of storm cleanup, hugel bed building, and soil amending, simultaneously, in what feels like every direction as we remove the last of the old fence and the worst of the honeysuckle and ivy that, yeah, escaped from our predecessors’ cultivation long ago. Growling diesel engines our soundtrack, the tree guy, the compost guy, and the quarry guy have stopped by, while #HorticultureHubby, given new purpose by two weeks with a backhoe-loader and a 30-yard dumpster, has opened up whole new vistas to the view from my office window.
Our meadow is still raw—still wild—but something vaguely resembling a garden is taking shape.
The plantings are very young, but the “bones” are here.
It’s starting to feel … like we’re rooted.
Of course, I heard the most heart-breaking story this weekend, so I’m wondering what sort of soil we’re rooting into.
My 97-year-old father, a bona fide living jazz legend whose pride in watching Obama inaugurated president (on the coldest day I can ever remember spending six hours outside) still makes me smile, called on Sunday his voice breaking, near tears. He’d been speaking with a friend whose grandson had decided (Lord knows why in this America) to enlist in the military. But upon calling the recruiting center to get more information, she was told, apparently on the basis of her Geechee accent: “We’re not taking your kind any more.” What do you mean? she asked. My kind. The woman’s response? “I’m just following orders.”
Now you have to remember histories that the current reich wishes to erase to understand why this hit my dad—and me—so hard. I was in middle school when the last vestiges of the “white primary,” the only mechanism by which a person could be elected to office in South Carolina, finally fell. (White primary? Yes, it was exactly what it sounds like—a primary in which only white candidates and white voters could participate.)
So this is where we are, every painfully realized goal of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 being nullified by wanna-be good Nazis “just following orders”—orders that for all we know were issued on Fox News.
It’s like salting soil that is already stony, depleted, and barely able to sustain life.
My tears, though? They endured for a night, and just like in the proverb, joy returned with the morning sun rising over my meadow, as my ritual of journaling, meditation, affirmations reminded me of the hard-won wisdom of my ancestors: that no weapon fashioned against us has ever triumphed for long—that every tongue rising against us in judgment has been and will once again be silenced. No effort to erase the African American presence from American life could ever succeed, because, regardless of starting point—1492 in the Bahamas, 1526 in Port Royal Sound; 1619 at Point Comfort; 1776 on Boston Commons—we were part of the story. Hell, as much as these folks hate to admit it, we are part of their DNA.1
So many in this confused and beleaguered nation are plotting wicked schemes—or stewing helplessly in fear of what might come. For those of my lineage, however, strength is found in simple acts. For example, sowing seeds.
… Seeds for the daily gifts of present moment attentiveness I find in the garden: the weeding, sowing, watering in the imponderable now, which fortifies the soil’s imprint upon the soul, strengthening us. Seeds for a future among friends and loved ones: the nourishing dinners and celebratory bonfires which connect us soul to soul, gladdening us.
All around us men and women are dreaming apocalyptic dreams and sowing seeds of (their own?) destruction as they wish for ours. We need not join them. In the garden all are stardust, golden—none can be dimmed or contained, least of all by the fears of the small-minded. Sow seeds. Share what you grow. Rest, wait, and grow strong for the battle to come.
Between 3.5 and 12 percent of European Americans have African American ancestry, according to a 2014 study based on 23andMe’s genetic database.