A few days before I left home to start my SALT term I cleaned up my plot in the community garden. As I pulled up the rampant velvetleaf and crabgrass and thinned the kale, it came to me that I was uprooting not just weeds and unwanted plants, but in some ways my own life as I step out to start a year-long term in Bosnia. I surveyed the vegetative carnage around me and wondered what in my life is weedy, what is good and productive, and what is simply planted too thickly and needs a little more space to live and breathe and become what it is intended to be.
The community garden relocated last winter to a corner of an alfalfa field; the ground was tilled and prepared for vegetable gardening, but it must have been a well-established field, judging by the alfalfa that regrew as many times as I pulled it. (My apologies to the ones who next tend our plot—you will have to either battle or embrace the alfalfa.) As I contemplated the plants I uprooted and the ones I left standing, there clearly was another category: the alfalfa, which was gone, but going to rise again from well-established root systems.
I take some comfort in this image of the alfalfa plant; its roots are deep and established, and though you feel that it is dead, again it springs forth, resilient, not uprooted at all. Leaving home for a year doesn’t cut off friendships or kinships or end the life I was leading there. And though what next grows from those roots may look a little different, it will still be alfalfa—or my life.
As for what in my life may prove to be weedy, productive, or in need of some air and sun to thrive…we shall see.
The community garden relocated last winter to a corner of an alfalfa field; the ground was tilled and prepared for vegetable gardening, but it must have been a well-established field, judging by the alfalfa that regrew as many times as I pulled it. (My apologies to the ones who next tend our plot—you will have to either battle or embrace the alfalfa.) As I contemplated the plants I uprooted and the ones I left standing, there clearly was another category: the alfalfa, which was gone, but going to rise again from well-established root systems.
I take some comfort in this image of the alfalfa plant; its roots are deep and established, and though you feel that it is dead, again it springs forth, resilient, not uprooted at all. Leaving home for a year doesn’t cut off friendships or kinships or end the life I was leading there. And though what next grows from those roots may look a little different, it will still be alfalfa—or my life.
As for what in my life may prove to be weedy, productive, or in need of some air and sun to thrive…we shall see.
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