WORK FOR FOOD

     If you look close enough at the photo there is an image of a hula girl on cinder block - and I found her while clearing the side yard this morning half buried in the bio-detritus. I was preparing a food garden, at last, this tiny land had been sitting fallow since I moved here, and now absent of overgrown brush looks to me a perfect herb &vegetable bed for a home farmer. I had missed doing yard work for cultivation (last time experiencing that was when I still lived in Portland, Ore., at an old English-cottage style house surrounded with fruit trees). I'm imagining a raised planter box growing allium bulbs that flower for pollinators and Crop Science-developed seeds that propagate diverse micro-ecosystems like sun berries with rainbow radishes and interspersed along them legume vines that fend for themselves with visiting wings. Summer is just around the corner. It has been a wet April and May on the island, yet the nutrient recharge as its steeping the ground is perfect timing for this work. 

     Harvest in the indigenous knowledge sense is undisturbed in nature. Tribal swidden system in the highlands (I learned years ago in grad school) is a case in point: the forest is a watershed and adjoining a rice terraces cultivation is irrigated from its roots downslope; it is a sun sink and also a buffer shade at different times of the day as earth renews from an inert axis and life abound in vegetated streams. Yet earth's performance needs an instrument in the hands of man. According to the shaman I interviewed (with a translator), a human touch designs the agronomical circuitry of the planet and turns it on. And prayer-chanting, the tribe cupping rice wine in their hands, is its fuel. On the Cordillera mountain my research focus was the role of those chants-in-supplicate to traditional agriculture, and what forms they render to consilience (E.O. Wilson, Harvard emeritus professor, coined this word, and it means: the harmony-transcendence of the astronomic with the anthropomorphic). I remember a classmate of mine in the program how she loved Wilson like a mentor having read all his books and having admired his tenacity to undercover deeper phenomenon and beauty from mere empirical science. She was a hardhat-wearer forester with a heart of a poetess. 

     It might not be a coincidence I have found a statue of  "Gaia" embedded in my garden - the mother of earth. May she bless my work on her land, and may I faithfully earn my keep.