Renewing Life in the First Days of Spring

As spring begins, many early flowers are blooming in yards and on hillsides: Yellow and purple Crocuses, blue and purple miniature irises, pale purple periwinkle and lemony yellow and eggshell white Daffodils are all heralding the slowly warming Earth. Ramp sprouts are appearing among the fallen leaves covering the ground and I hear, as I do each March, the throaty rasp of Redwing Blackbirds near the small waterway running along the side of our hollow. Despite lows in the 20's for several nights, in our garden the first Arugula seeds are sprouting, reawakening with the Earth from the cold darkness of the dormant season. Using old sheets, we cover the garden bed most nights to protect the fragile seedlings as they begin new life.

This year, as we have in the last few years, we will add over a thousand pounds of compost and manure to the garden to strengthen the soil that our seeds depend on. When we began the garden about ten years ago, we discovered that the clayish soil contained buried bottles, broken plates and other trash thrown out decades before. Our first harvests were poor, but as we added manure, compost, leaves and other organic fertilizers, our harvests improved.

Our Saint Patrick’s Day tradition with our friend happened the Friday before the actual holiday due to a schedule conflict. As we drank beer and listened to Irish music, our friend, my wife and I talked about what the “American Dream” had meant to her family and community, as opposed to my understanding of it. The phrase, so commonly used in our culture, has a very different meaning to our friend than to me. For our friend, the dream is one of community and unity made possible by the rewards of hard work; from my viewpoint, many who pursue the dream emphasize wealth at the cost of community. We agreed to meet again, so I could hear more about her experience growing up in an ethnic working class community.

The violent men-money-chasers-puritans I work with practice good works in their communities as my wife and I try to, though some of them are hostile to outsiders and disregard the Feminine. As a result, they live in communities that both support them within it, but which are at odds with other communities of violent men-money-chasers-puritans of other religions, nationalities, and so forth. Living my childhood as an outsider and scapegoat in a community like this taught me the importance of building both community and inclusion.

As we have gotten older, my wife and I have watched people around us building or damaging the webs of life around them. In some cases, men have abandoned their wives or girlfriends in affairs with younger women, only to end up alone and lonely in their later years. Other people have been affected by addictions or other problems, creating hardship. The strands of life around these people and their families have been broken or weakened, making a more difficult life for them and their children. While the intolerance of puritan communities can create conflict, the lesson of practicing good works within our community is an essential one. This is especially important for the children and grandchildren of my generation, who will live in a human world that they will inherit from us.

Like looking at the soil where we sow our early spring seed, looking at the strength of a web of life is an omen of the strength of the people in it when long-term crises arise. Renewing inclusive, supportive communities and the fertility of our Earth is an essential practice. In doing so we are undoing the harm of previous generations, both to the Earth and to humanity.

For most of us, these challenges exist within our own families and communities and the Earth around us; our stories are the stories of history slowly unfolding. Choices by our elders to work through issues—to overcome addictions, to work through anger issues, to release racial and gender privileges, to provide a stable home for our partners and family—were crucial to our lives. Failures of our elders to work through these same issues often means that we are faced with overcoming them within ourselves; our failures are likewise passed on to future generations.

As I learned the inter-generational stories of families, it was sometimes possible to foresee trials and hardships years before they would arise. I sometimes imagine elder spirits watching us as our lives unfold and thinking, “I will check in with this person in two or three years, when a crisis will force him to choose between repeating the mistakes of his elders or finding a new path for himself. Until then, I can see all will continue as it has.”

My wife’s frequent babysitting and caring for others in our family and community and my volunteer work are attempts to strengthen our soul cluster just as compost strengthens our garden. Perhaps, if I live past the doorway of my own death, I will pass into a happier, stronger web of life than when I was a child—but that is not so important. What is important is that our actions, combined with the positive works of our generation, will strengthen our family, community and Earthly webs of life for my stepchildren and all the young people around them. On days that I am weary, it is easy to worry that this cannot be attained by good works; on days when I take part in the seasonal miracle of life arising from the still wintry Earth, I have faith that the strength of good works can overcome the mistakes of my generation.