The price of earthly resonance

The gardening experiment has yielded many important insights for my process of discovering re-wilding, some in favor of gardening, but mostly against it.

A lover of dirt and plants and food, of course, I love gardening.  Going to Home Depot was exciting, undimmed by my cynical criticisms at how the treated soil, the plastic pots, and the corporate atmosphere were utterly antithetical to what I was trying to do.  Moments after muttering to myself how absurd it was that you can buy a full-grown cherry tomato bush with green tomatoes already growing on it for $14.95 (and how terrible it is that something so intimate as a plant of food could become a commercial product) - I found myself thinking, "That's not a bad price, really." 

Though I didn't stoop to that level, I still bought some three-inch seedlings in a biodegradable pot to plant in my larger pots at home, and I must admit, I had so much fun planting and watering them.  Like a new romance, I have repeatedly gone outside just to see and admire them, pretending I'm checking on how much sun they are getting and checking the wetness of the soil.  I also noticed that my neighbors have bought many new plants, and I felt a shared celebratory camaraderie with them.

Yet, I still didn't have an answer about whether this pleasant self-indulgence was a diversion or if it was a remedy for dissociation.  In order to attune to the impact the gardening has had on me, and prepare to articulate it on this blog, I did some free movement in my room just after sunset:

breathing deeply with swinging arms
crouching and burrowing my face into the dark of my arms and hair
slowly emerging, belaboring against gravity
expansive breath, leaning full-heartedly into the perpetual discomfort
of being in the world in comfort
as a civilized human.
No, gardening did not help.

The earthly resonance in my body seems to harbor a kind of greed, a hyperextension of myself into the space, a grinning mockery derived from theft.  If I live in safety and have plenty of food to eat while others don't, then I am the beneficiary of their suffering.  Perhaps the only way I can cut out the kudzu, the cancer, the aggression of my existence is to diminish myself in some way.  Gardening doesn't do that at all, and in fact, brings me more happiness and pleasure.  It is exactly this kind of happiness and pleasure that seems somehow out of place in the reality of how I live.

I watched a documentary last week called Living on One Dollar A Day about a group of college students who attempt to live for 8 weeks in rural Guatemala.  They were very hungry and lost a lot of weight.  I was eating dinner as I watched it.