By MK Martin
Do you remember the first time you felt The Fear? When you’re a kid, the world is enormous, and there are often dimensions to it your grown up counterparts cannot even see, let alone protect you against. You are afraid, but you do not have The Fear. You are small, but there hasn’t been enough time for you to really doubt yourself. Come what may, you’ll put your hands up, jump with your scraped knees and shout until the walls come down.
I’m asking, because I see you.
I see you, thinking you can’t grow things. Your thumbs are parched from sticking them out in the sun, trying to catch a break. You have so many things to do, any plant in your periphery is doomed to wither and die because your kids have to eat before you do. And actually, you don’t like nature that much. Bugs are lethal these days, aren’t they?
So start small. Go back to the smallness of what a person was expected to do, when your face was a bare peek above the table top. Head to your local nursery, and stand in the greenhouse, enveloped by sweaty oxygen and feel small. Stand next to a plant that looks bright, and green, produces something (in theory) that you might eat. Say hello. Do it in your head, if it makes you feel less silly. Feel less silly, anyway, when the person standing next to you is also talking to seedlings.
Take your bundle of leaves home with you, see that it is small. Find it a biggish home, for the summer, where it will try its hardest to grow for you, if you are willing. Set it in the sun, so it can feel warm, and water its roots every few days, so it can stretch its legs. Grow, inside, as you watch your plant multiply, and marvel at the shrinking Fear inside you. Even if it does not fruit this year, even if aphids take it down after weeks of fighting against them valiantly, you have succeeded.
This is the marvel of the plant world. A physical representation of the magic of energy, and how it is never wasted, only reimagined.
farmtheworld.org 