getting hands dirty

Cultivation, foremost, is an act of faith.
There are the practicalities, of course. You can read your almanac or the book of your experience, do your best to predict when the last frost is, and the first of the blackberries. You can start your seeds indoors, test the soil, add fertilizers. Cultivation is about planning and knowledge and transmission, as well.
There are the brutalities, too. Garden, farm, or window box, the act of intentionally growing things comes with a lot of casual killing, from the bugs that eat your crop to the weeds that choke it--and what is a weed but a plant somewhere you don't want it, competing for resources with the ones you're protecting? Cultivation is also about judgment and guardianship, and the sometimes savage effort to maintain an order you've arranged, because the flip side of nurturing is showing your teeth to whatever wants to destroy what you've nurtured, often enough.
Then, too, it's about death and decay. Working in the soil means tilling under what has died from seasons before and recognizing the fundamental work done by mortality to make fresh growth possible. Cultivation is about honoring what's gone before and letting it be dead, too, so it can feed and found a new work.
Cultivation is a lot of things, but before all of them, it is about faith.

We had a freak snowstorm last week, which in March is very strange, around here. We're low-lying and rain-heavy, but rarely below freezing even in midwinter, and by this time of year it's often all sun and flower-buds. And we had snow, and hail, out of nowhere, for a couple of days on and off. The vegetables and herbs I started in pots out on the porch were brought in: less sunlight, more safety. And I know that for them to grow properly, they need to go outdoors soon, where I can't look after them all the time, where I can't come check up on them first thing in the morning with a little warm water and coo at how quickly my peas and mustard have grown. They'll have to go outside, and some of them--my strawberries have doubled in size--will probably need to go in the ground, or into pots too big for the living room.

There is no guarantee that there won't be another surprise frost. No guarantee of no more hail until October. You can plan, and predict, and draw lines and prognostications, you can figure out what's likely, and where the sun and shade are. But you can't be certain that there won't be a pepper-wrecking snow-flurry in April. And while you can viciously tear away the English ivy and the Himalayan blackberry until they can't strangle your apple tree and your onions, you can't defy the sky that way. You can't really keep the neighbor's cat from using your plot as a litterbox while you're not watching. You can't have an ironclad promise that some mole or raccoon won't come along in the night and take your roots and fruit. My own formidable mother never could keep the deer from nipping the blooms from her roses. Sometimes your carrots just end up compost for next year, and your wildflowers crow food before they're sprouted.

Planting seeds, and investing in them water and food and warmth and love, is a dedication to the prospect of an uncertain future. It's about accepting the premise that more seasons are to come, and that it's worth the risk to expect to be present for them. As the saying goes, "if, when the Last Day comes, you're on the way into your fields to plant an olive tree...plant your olive tree." It's a promise, however often broken, to focus care and effort on a world yet to come and to try not to break if something goes wrong. Maybe your roses are torn up by a hailstorm. You can try again next year.

Cultivation is an act of defiance. It says that no matter what the world may throw at you, no matter how unpredictable the vicissitudes of fate and weather and probable misfortune, you have chosen the courage of trying anyway. A sprouting plant, like any infant enterprise, is fragile and vulnerable. The cultivator accepts this, and moves forward knowing the way the ground lies. Tilling from a fallow field, working under the debris of past enterprises and planting new seeds, ultimately means making rude gestures at pessimism. It is a rebellion against every uncontrollable force that would take away what we love, and by definition cannot be futile. The heartbreak of a ruined crop, a matter of life or death for many people, still leaves the hope of a workable field for someone yet to come, some other season, even once we're gone. It will be ready for someone else to nurture until it provides them with beauty and sustenance and spring-green hope.

Those of us working to shield, water, and love these shoots and sprouts are often knocked down by the despair and fear of what the unpredictable skies might do to them. And many of us are too fearful to continue on and scatter more seeds, let alone set to plowing. But the skies won't get any more predictable by our fearing them, and neither will the neighbor's cat or the hungry deer, let alone some stranger's random malice. We can only do our best to prepare our plots, fertilize the soil, and know what grows best where; we can find ways to sustain ourselves with the compost of last year's failures and successes; we can stand up against what forces we can see coming and arm ourselves against. And then we just put in the daily work of weeding and watering and maintaining, and hope that hail doesn't come.

Hope is not a foolish standing back and pretending that all will be well if we believe it will. It requires vigilance, discernment, focus, and effort. It requires that we fight back the ivy, prepare the earth, and get our hands in the dirt if we want anything to come. It demands that we know our needs and desires and are prepared to shape what we have to make those goals possible, and that just as much we give a new life room to grow for itself. It also requires that we understand the world sometimes simply doesn't care about our tender pepper plants and darling blossoming peas, and we will lose them. Hope is not about gambling, you see, because hope is not blind, and it is not all about luck. It is about cultivation. It is about labor, and love, and faith: not the nonsensical faith of passivity, but the faith that encourages us to do the work before and trust that, even if the hailstorm comes, the work itself matters.

We can only put those beloved seeds out into the world and do our best to see that they have a chance. After that, it's all up to the hard work of hope.