To Repair Our Lives - Last Week of April

Rest

The hard small strength of a thousand seeds exhilarate

cascading from hopeful palm

spilling chhhh—sshhhhh

over the toe of my boot

and onto dark soaked soil

When the snow and ice retreated a few weeks ago this earth was completely bare. No remnant vegetation or roots from the previous year. Soft with spring-melt and rain, the soil sucked at my boots.

This land - damaged by intense pasturing of our flock of hens over many years - violates basic principles of sustainable and regenerative land use. Untampered with, Nature does not leave bare, unprotected, unproductive soil surfaces. To do so invites erosion, loss of topsoil and nutrients, drying and compaction, and a habitat too depleted to sustain life.

A few times every year we move our hen flocks to alternate pens and seed this ground with a variety of wild and domesticated field plants which will cover and green this piece of earth and nourish the chickens and life of the soil.

This past winter, the need for repair of the pens’ soil weighted me. I considered and calculated options: diminishing flock size, creating additional pens for increased rotational grazing, re-designing the henhouse for more exits into segmented spaces. This need to strategize repairs for the land consumed much of my visioning for the upcoming season.

This was likely related to a winter in which my rawness and our world’s vulnerability were laid glaringly bare by a year of pandemic death and restriction, by devastating fire and flood, by jolts of continued public killings of brown and black people, by pronounced inequities and the related hard-to-contain rage and fear.

I had a deep need to believe in repair for my own soul, to believe in repair for communities I am intertwined with knowingly and also less directly. This manifested itself in my preoccupation with soil repair. So much so that weeks before it was viable I seeded multiple pens. The seeds of different shades and shapes played from hand into soil which was in some places completely flooded. I carefully walked upon the seeds, pressing them into the mud to increase their chances against the hunger of wild song birds, to increase their chances of taking root.

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. Even as I offered it to the soil, it played within me.

I shut various gates so chickens couldn't access these parts of the pens. The ground would rest. In the resting seed coats would soften in the rain and wet, radicals (first roots) would push out and into the soil yearning for it, the seed coat would slip off as the first tiny pair of cotyledon leaves unfold green towards sky. This process would require a rest of a few weeks before chickens would be allowed to again feed and dig into the life of this earth.

Rest.

The word resonates in me even more than the idea of seeds and the green life they promise.

Rest.

This early growing season of preparation and starting seeds signals the end of any rest as we food growers and foragers turn ourselves toward the time of explosive growth and life.

But… Rest…

Our individual and collective souls, nervous systems, eyes and ears cry for a pause. A pause in the bombardment of news of more shootings, hate crimes, global COVID numbers… and Minneapolis courtroom testimony full with tears of grief and helplessness at witnessing the death of George Floyd — a Black man already impacted by systems and history. A pause in the replay of images of dying, fear, abuse of power.

Rest? ...please.

And then it was done — an amazingly speedy verdict. Many rejoiced. Some were broken.

And Minneapolis paused — so prepared with concrete barriers and military humvees. …Instead a day, a night with no sirens wailing in the streets.

Rest.

And days after the verdict, there are those of us still struggling to believe, even as we pray for the healing of everyone, including the convicted. Struggling to believe that this verdict moves us towards justice and care taken with each others’ lives. And care taken of our own too-fearful selves - whatever our color.

Two strong beautiful Black women of my generation, who lead and heal communities in and around race talked with me. We spoke of griefs triggered last week, and the need for breath, the need for faith.

Faith that the powerful ones will not let this great exception of affixing responsibility for the loss of a Black life satisfy them into not taking the next hard look, the next hard step, and then the next towards more just systems. We were too old, had seen too much, carried too many years of unease. Now our young ones were insisting on, challenging us into, faith.

Faith that the less powerful will know we are powerful beyond measure and will live and work accordingly.

Faith that we can rest — even briefly.

**** *****

But the hens are stressed, restricted to just part of their soggy pen to honor the rest needed by the newly seeded portions. In closer quarters the chickens pick at each other. I wait a day, and another. I hope it is my imagination that the flock is needing more space. I am desperate to keep the seeded soil resting on the other side of the gate. But it is too early for rest. It will be weeks before other pens are dry enough to hold even a divided flock. After years of experience, I knew it was foolish to seed and rest a pen this early in the rainy season. But the toll of this year’s events had me ragged enough to try.

Reluctantly I open a gate. The hens and their roosters rush through. The rest is over before it bears fruit.

**** ****

Another mass shooting.

An unarmed brown child is killed in an encounter with the police.

COVID ravages India.

And I find tiny bits of rest —

Talking to wise sisters.

Listening to a hopeful intelligent adult son.

And in the guiding witness of an astute elder - herself in repair - I dance mournful ferocious prayers. I dance breath, birthing, and sinking into the earth. Perhaps I am pressed down like seeds in the mire. Seeds that might - with rest - bless and repair.

And I turn myself to tending the seeds for this year’s gardens.

Regina LarocheApril 29, 2021