Beauty Way

A thick layer of composted manure hides the cardboard. Grass and chickweed yellow and wilt against crumbly dirt underneath. There is death and decomposition and the nourishment of the soil, but it takes time.

After a week we plant squash by shoveling through soggy cardboard and into the hardpan. A dusting of fish meal fertilizer and a handful more compost, a tucking in of roots, a blessing on leaves. Months from now (if all goes well) there will be butternuts and delicata and sweet pie pumpkins swelling in girth and stretching vines to far corners of the garden where the mint grows in clumps and the snakes lie still in the sun. The popcorn seeds will have outgrown their hulls, grown into the sky with dark tassels waving, waiting for specks of life to brush against silk and crawl into the belly of kerneled possibility.

Changed, all of it.

We nourish the soil for our own purpose, for this food that is growing that will fill our bellies in the winter. We nourish the soil around these little islands of seeds and stalks so that the ground will repair itself with microbes and worms. We nourish the soil to nourish the soil. I may not be here to reap the benefits of the latter. I may have moved house or leapt into the stars. It doesn’t matter. In this moment, with these hands, I am creating beauty and healing in this place.

When I first moved in it was difficult for me to look past the chipped paint and cracks in the wall and overgrown weeds in the garden. Why should we fix up land and a house when we are not sure we are going to stay? I stared at the crabgrass in the flowerbeds and the piles of dead blackberry branches and gnarled pear trees and felt hopeless and resentful. Why should I fix up someone else's house, why should they benefit off of my hard work? Why didn’t they do it to begin with? Why can’t it be exactly how I want it to be!

I was startled by the ferocity of my reaction. Where was this anger and resentment coming from? Aren't most of our waking hours spent doing things that benefit other people? What happened to the young girl in the family kitchen who only wanted to help for the sake of helping?

Out into the garden, out into the world is what needs to happen when that anger arises. I picked up pieces of plastic twine and bottles, chip bags and wire as I went along up onto the hill and deeper into the jungle of Scot’s Broom, entangled in my thoughts. Tiny purple flowers led me to a clearing underneath a pine where deer dream and squirrels chirp. Each step is connected with the past and future ones and they overlap with all the other beings that have stepped and slithered and floated onto this earth before. We are layers of being. Layers of beauty and destruction and care.We can leave the trash on the ground or pick it up to reveal the growth below.

It hit me.

Beauty Way. The concept seems simple: leave a place more beautiful than you found it.

It is that simple to do. It can be sweeping a floor or placing a rose in a vase. It can be leaving a piece of art by a trail or filling a bowl with water for the birds or changing a roll of toilet paper before it totally runs out. Beauty Way can also be amending the soil and planting and tending even when there is no plan for the future. The ‘why-should-I-bother’ sentiment disappears and an attitude of service fills in the void the more it is practiced. Why not make a room, a garden, a patch of land, a community more beautiful than how one found it just for the sake of beauty?
Why not give without asking to receive?

I’d like to think I’ve been doing Beauty Way all my life but...yeah right. On the scale of generous verses transactional I do believe my scale tipped towards the latter. That is how we often survive. And then, in a very short time, I was shown another way to live. I don’t think I was fully conscious of the magic and complexity of Beauty Way until staying at The Ojai Foundation where I learned how to be of service joyfully instead of with a sense of obligation or direct (or indirect) personal benefit. The transition was steep and I spent more than a couple weeks checking my watch to see when my three hours of “Beauty Way” chores were done each day. And then they ceased to be chores. And then I stopped checking my watch and instead started watching the birds play in freshly drawn water and felt the intense energy of the Beauty Way-ed land. I realized that sitting in Council circle with others, listening for the sake of listening, that was a form of Beauty Way, too.

It clicked that I was fully capable of choosing to live the Beauty Way instead of a life of begrudging obligation. I still forget this when the bills are due and 18-hour work days leave me exhausted or the weeds in the garden grow faster than the peas or I get pissed off for having to clean up somebody's mess. If I can breathe and switch gears, refocus on giving freely instead of conditionally, I am able to live in this beauty. It doesn’t always work, that’s for sure, but when it does I am filled with a gratitude that seems almost silly while washing dishes. And it is fun! Finding ways to nourish the land or a relationship with little notes and sweet gestures makes me realize that this life is a game. It is a choice to see that game as warlike or joyful.

Dishes for Beauty. Toilet Paper for Beauty. Squash and Cardboard and Manure for Beauty.

Life is beauty if we can just nourish the seed of playful generosity within us.

Rolly poley farm

On hands and knees. 

Heads down, close to the dirt on the sidewalk. They sift through compost and perlite, peat moss and concrete dust. "Help us look for rolly-poleys," they say. 

I smile and join in, my fingernails far dirtier than theirs. 

I am happy to abandon the activity I had planned. It involved making planters: newspaper rolled around a can, taped up, sharpi-ed with a name of a child, the name of a vegetable.

They dug soil out of an orange bucket. One of the kids had found plastic spoons to use. I said they could use their hands. They didn't want to get dirty, they said. Kids not wanting to get dirty? I told them I loved getting dirty, that soil is good, that that is where all our food comes from. They spooned the soil into the little planters, chose their popcorn or squash seeds, beans or radishes. They made more planters, planted more seeds. They drowned their seeds in water, put them in the sun to grow.

A small boy with a mohawk checked on his seeds every twenty minutes to see if they were growing yet. I told him it might take a week. How long a week is to a kid! I miss that feeling of endless time on hot summer days playing in the bushes and trees in the front yard, doves declaring summer evenings, the smell of Eucalyptus and chlorine and barbecued chicken. A week was a lifetime away.

But the seed would probably grow in a few days if he watered it, I said. He could plant it in his yard. "I don't have a yard." Plant it in someone else's yard, I said, but knew this wasn't a good answer. I knew the roots would become bound, the paper disintegrate if he wasn't able to find a home for it in a couple of weeks. Would that discourage him from growing anything else in his life? Was I setting these apartment-bound kids up for traumatic plant-killing experiences instead of welcoming them to the fascinating world of gardening? Was I being classist and inconsiderate? Whoa farmer, I thought. Hopefully the adults in their life will step in and find a bigger planter, find a spot in the sun, nourish and encourage and grow. I can help plant the seed but I can't farm everyone, right? Besides, with all the hula hooping and glitter and bead art projects this afternoon, the chances of him remembering his little planters could be slim. But maybe he'd plant a seed again some day with this memory kicking around in the back of his little head.

My favorite part of the afternoon was not rolling and taping and filling and seeding. It was when the kids plunged their hands into the dirt looking for rolly-poleys, when they filled a plastic bottle with dirt and leaves for their rolly-poley farm and deposited found bugs in their new home. Should we poke holes so they can breathe? they asked, concerned for the wellbeing of their new pets. When digging in the bucket seemed ineffective they asked if they could dump out the dirt on the sidewalk. 

They seemed to expect me to say no, it would be too messy. 

I said sure, lets do it. 

We'll clean up the mess, they said without me saying anything about it. 

I smiled. "I like messes."

Dirty elbows and knees, kids looking through the dirt, asking other kids to come help. 

I love nothing more than getting kids dirty. I rarely see it. These city kids are told to stay clean. So many are scared of the earth that feeds them because their parents are too. So I tell them to get dirty, smell the soil, taste the chocolate mint and rosemary that sits on the table nearby. 

I think it is my job. But they teach me too. They give the bugs names and push around the soil and are earnest in their pursuit, totally in the moment. They are not thinking about climate change or where their dinner will come from. They stay until the hula hoops or glitter wands call to them and then they focus on gyrating and gluing glitter strewn beads to paper.

I smile and am happy in this moment, in this dirt, a water bottle full of rolly-poleys at my feet.

Giving back

He was shot in the head ten years ago.
Today he is pulling weeds from the tangled beds.
He is sifting compost with strong arms, strong back.
He is clearing pathways and unearthing wilting chard to be turned into soil.
He is grasping a trowel and bucket in his hands and marching through the farm saying to no one in particular and the world, "Yehaw! I am giving back! I'm doing something! Finally!"
After ten years of recovery, disability leave, short term memory loss and frustration, he is getting involved, getting active in his community, giving instead of taking, he says.
I tear up and laugh and smile, thankful for sunglasses to hide damp eyes.

He, and everyone else who has a story (of healing, memories, love- so yeah, everyone), that is why I'm here. We grow, we learn, we take bites of nectarines and give back our time and sweat. The line blurs and it is unclear whom is giving back to whom and it is a wonderful feeling to be in that blurry symbiotic space.

We can heal in the fellowship of the dirt.