All Souls (Saints) Day, Part 1

I am behind, as usual. We are over a week into November and I have just emptied the three sisters garden patch: corn, beans, winter squashes. Stems and stalks are dry and raspy. Some bean pods are still green, some rattle. In other years, the soil holding them would have begun to stiffen or been pelted by damp snow/sleet, if not buried by an all-out winter snow storm. The ease of pulling the unwanted grasses (still green), the way the dark soil falls loosely from my palm, the mild air as I begin to warm from my labors are surprisingly pleasing.

I dread this clearing time. This admission that growth and harvest have ended, that what we tended last season is now dead. [Or worse yet - they may not be completely dead, and thanks to unseasonable warmth, there are new blooms and late fruit starts - all doomed.]

I’ve mentioned before that I became a farmer because I love life - seeing it unfurl, supporting the interconnected living partnerships, working myself to exhaustion inspired by life rising. It’s taken me years of farming to admit I see (and even cause) more death than life. And I’m still working to internalize that the way I attempt to live with land, plants, creatures, and microbes (not necessarily distinct categories) means that I do not pit life against death, but understand the cycle of life and death as increasingly generative. Death is not a dead end, but becomes and facilitates life in new forms. (Thank you, compost pile and forest floor, for these teachings!)

The pumpkins and thick bundle of corn stalks speak of Halloweens, Fall Festivals, Thanksgivings. Of synthetic ghouls and ghosts playing at something ancient for the sake of a bag of treats, a shriek-worthy surprise, a night of pretend. But this is a ghost season in many ways. The downtown streets of our little Island town are emptied such that a tumbleweed rolling down our ghost-town streets wouldn’t surprise. The gardens with their emptiness and faded remnants hold ghosts of my original plans and dreams; hold ghosts of the food, flowers, medicines grown in the season just ended. The roar of waves and wind carry voices warning of coming winter storms.

But there are other ghosts — ghosts buried in the heart of the seeds we’ve been gathering these last weeks. Ghosts which seep the story of stars, continental rift, volcano, and glacier into the lake, rock, and topsoil of this watershed. Ghosts which breathe the footsteps and ceremony of the indigenous ones who stood on these shores 10,000 years ago and in all the centuries since - indigenous ones who tended and prayed the waters and land.

Scientists tell us (as have Indigenous peoples of many continents) that each seed carries the genetic story of the geography, climate, and horticultural efforts and wisdom of human tenders of thousands of seasons. Do the ghosts of these histories escape the cracked open seed and rise, made tangible by root, stem, blossom, and fruit? Do these ghosts when consumed in salad or soup dance through our bodies and souls and into the world through our lives?

My heart has been broken open with awe and sadness in recent years as I learned of the faith and foresight of African women torn from their home villages and flung into an unimaginable and unrecognizable world of stinking middle passage ship holds and then into enslavement in a strange land and language. These women with their worlds on fire, had the vision to braid seeds into the hair of their children and each other. This act in the face of life ending as they knew it, was an act of supreme care, love, and trust that there would be a future - that there would be descendants who would need to be nourished with food, memory, and prayer; and that these descendants would live worthy of this faith and love, cultivating and protecting seed, land, and spirit.

Similarly, women indigenous to North America safeguarded seeds against their bodies through deadly forced marches and violent displacements.

So, we press seeds carrying these stories, these histories, this love into the earth. When life rises from them, breaking through the soil are we not surrounded by ghosts - memory - spirit of love, faith, tenacity, and promise?

What if these ghosts of love are seeking to home themselves in our lives, in our actions, in what we pass on? What if, at the same time, these ghosts are inviting us home into their love, their unshakable belief in what we can and must accomplish in this future they could not imagine?

And what if the malevolent ghosts — those that terrorize our souls and streets — are seeking home, too? Generational and historical traumas might be called ghosts, playing through our DNA which have been altered by centuries of racialized (and other) violence and communal loss. What if generational, historical healing is as possible as generational trauma? What if we - their children of today - can bring healing to ourselves and our ancestors who lived through the unendurable yet continued to hold forth a handful of living seeds?

We are a world of traumatized people - no matter our skin color and culture - haunted by broken ghosts. We are also a world community that has been handed incredible gifts with great possibility.

What if we begin to home and heal the wailing ghosts with repair — words, acts, and gifts of reparation?

What if planting and tending our seeds in the “good way” is a repair reaching back to tend our planet as well as the ghosts of the past?

Grateful for the ghosts - the spirit of love and faith - which nourish our souls, and call forth the best reparative love we each can offer…

- Regina

To Repair Our Lives - Early November, 2021

All Souls (Saints) Day, Part 1