Regina & Apprentice Eliza (and Lady Chaga) play and create in the garden:

“What if we seed play into the garden?”

Hailing from Belleville, WI, Eliza Woods is a dancer, poet, lemon bar lover, and proud nerd. This past May, she graduated from UMD with a degree in Anthropology, and she's been living, learning, and creating at Diaspora Gardens ever since.

And when it’s time, the settling, mingling, transformation of these elements of last year’s life will give rise to an irresistible call to start seeds… Seeds to grow food and communal resilience and celebration. Seeds to invite people into communities to imagine and support repair. Seeds to share.

A prayer and video as we birth the New Year

Ms. Emma Olive Martin was born in South Carolina in 1940. She was the baby of the family - Daddy’s favorite. Hers was a large singing laughing dark-skinned family. They prayed hard, played hard, worked hard…

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.

I have had the gift of repairing my own soul and story as I held out my meager offerings. I am reminded of what so many people know who have much less than I have: sharing from your little, grows spirit and life.

Every year I plant sweet potatoes to connect me by invisible root threads to the thousand-season-old memory of my Island and African ancestors held in the story and flesh of the yam and sweet potato.

To maintain health and sustainability we will tend the tree. Its brokenness, resilience, fruit, gifts, and history will be supported and celebrated. This with the knowledge that the rot is opportunistic and always possible even when it appears to be eliminated.

Now, doing the ordinary — which is not at all ordinary in pandemic time — I feel the breakable in me grow more supple, quiet, and resilient.

A Wall of Division - A Spark of Change

As I pressed the seeds down I thought of a saying I’d heard often in the spirited worship of some Black churches: “Blessings pressed down and spilling over.” As I poured and pressed seeds, I felt the release of offering blessing and repair.