Just in time for my tender heart and winter-weary body, some spring warmth has arrived, I am sowing seed in the greenhouse, the compost is turned, my husband and a friend installed the new door on the cold frame, and yesterday the two black currants, three tiny blueberry plants, and two “Chicago Hardy” fig trees arrived in a long box on my front steps.
Then, in the middle of the night, as I got up to use the bathroom, I felt some static electricity move through my lower back, and now, uh-oh, it aches when I move certain ways. Sigh. Such is life as an elder. The black currants arrived bare-root. I have them soaking in a bucket of water in the greenhouse, but they will need to go into the soil today if they are to survive. I will have to dig slowly and carefully to do that without annoying my body further. It will heal, though. It knows how, it knows what, and it speaks rather insistently when I am impeding its progress.
In 2001, just after the attacks, as soon as the then president and his crew began beating their war drums, and just as my eldest child went away to college, I had a spell of back pain in the same place. It was brutal, and it lasted for weeks. Being who I was then (and still am now) I looked to find the intersection between my spirit and body. I came across Carolyn Myss’ book Anatomy of the Spirit, and read that our lower back is where we carry our concerns for family and personal security. Yep, that fit.
Here we are twenty-five years later at the start of another war in the middle-east with yet another bunch of ridiculous drummers pounding, hurting, harming, maiming, and ordering the killing of another bunch of people; and my lower back sizzles and aches along with my heart. It still fits.
A daughter and I, both with fantasies of a peaceful life somewhere “else,” talked about the desire to escape last evening, though we know it is only a temptation to believe that any such place exists, or can be created so that it can be untouched by a world so skewed towards violence and oppression, and on a planet so abused by her own creatures (us.) No. There is no place, there is only us. We are either heaven or hell; we create one or the other by living our lives. We human beings “hold the key to love and fear all in [our] trembling hands.” - The Youngbloods
We spoke about the need to “root down deep” instead of trying to run away from the world. We spoke about being here, now, on purpose; even when we are unsure of how that purpose manifests. We talked about how insecure we feel as the world teeters and totters on the edge of madness and extinction. It is discomfiting and dizzying to say the least. It is hard to stand with confidence on a shifting terrain, it wrenches our backs and troubles our sense of balance. Good thing we are agile creatures.
Where I “root down deep” is in this half-acre bit of land in central Connecticut where the weather is still temperate, though wild, and the seasons are becoming less and less predictable.
I practice “rooting down deep” by planting fruiting shrubs, tending apple and cherry trees, growing nettles for tea (for me and my gardens,) growing salad greens and cooking greens, beans for eating and drying, tomatoes for slicing and saucing. Food for now and later; food for me, my beloveds, my community.
My sore back, aching heart, and bruised spirit find strength, solace, and life in the soil of this tiny bit of Earth, just as my tree-sisters and fungal-brothers do. This is, and could be, Eden once again. It is where I make my home, it is one of the places I commune with Mystery, it is heaven (which is not a place, but an energy that is rooted deeply within each human heart that bids it welcome.) Bid it welcome.
Courage my dears. Love one another.
