Bites, Your Community Supported Kitchen Blog

First Fruits

I am too much of an empiricist to be a true believer; and yet I have experienced too much of the profound Mystery to be a skeptic.  As I see it, natural selection and Creationsim are hardly mutually exclusive, and often there is more truth in a Van Gogh than in a photograph.  
This morning we harvested our first kale leaves, really the first food of our own planting from this new home, and I was moved to prayer – a simple but profound Hebrew prayer offering thanks for coming once again to this time of year.  It is a blessing offered at the start of most Jewish events and holidays, but also upon tasting the first of a fruit or food each season, or even seeing something, like snowflakes, for the first time in the year.  There are additional prayers for events like hearing thunder, or seeing the ocean, or even washing the hands.  What acute awareness of the power of the mundane; of the presence of the spiritual in all moments, not just those of which we take special notice.

The underlying lesson is that whether there is a divine nature to our being, or we are just a mathematically random blip of occurrence in a cosmos of infinite potential, the use of small rituals helps us in our pursuit of simply being ourselves.  We garden not just for the food that we need, or the skill it cultivates, but because the ritual of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and putting by helps keep us aware of the day in the season, the season in the year and the year in our life – it is the paint on the canvas.

It has taken a lot of patience on my part to accept that our full yard/ garden plan will not come to fruition this spring.  We had to commit to more pressing demands, like building the kitchen, but I am proud of us for having planned well enough to have transplanted some of our gardening rituals up here with us.  We have potatoes and greens in and thriving.  Some peas too, to run the rabbit gauntlet.  Our tomatoes and peppers are newly transplanted and I still intend to expand the garden to accommodate a patch of vineing cucurbits.  I am grateful that after 7 months of flux we are finally settling in, that our simple life rituals, manifest in those leaves of kale, have found us again.