To scatter seeds is an act of faith.
A deep dispute here has left our lives uncertain.
This week I walked the beds I’ve made. No-till beds made of brown paper feed-sacks and wood ash and woodchip, manure; waste products, which will once again begin the cycle, germinating in secret to close a loop that would otherwise lie unreconciled. Effort makes the year whole. It opens a path to spring.
This is land I’ve drained – years of filthy channel digging – a piece of ground that I’ve slowly enclosed with a pile of cast-off rotting wood, lifting the burden of the post rammer and the unwieldy iron spike. Seventy kilos suspended above me, falling each time with a future’s weight.
It’s not my land, but I scatter seeds on it nonetheless. Lucerne and black oats and sunflower seeds, rice grain, why not. Let’s see what comes. From end to end I walk the beds. I think: faith matters.
It marks the end of a process begun almost twenty years ago, to cultivate a space that was bramble and bog when I came. The first channel I dug here ran the length of the field. Fifty metres. I was twenty seven years old. The same age as my mother when she came.
Gardening’s ephemeral, she’s often told me.
But I think: even hopeless faith matters. The unfeeling motion of cause and effect – as I wrote in the piece linked above, one year ago now - has no word to say on the subject of meaning.
Into the passage of time, I cast the weight of windblown seeds.