Earth, our great mirror

Uncovering plastic and beliefs in the garden and embracing the messiness of the healing path

Through my Mother’s Mother I come from a lineage of farmers and crafters, though I was brought up with little in the ways of tending land and animals or growing food. My Oma grew up on a homestead and when she moved to America she began a garden of her own. As a child she would coax me to help her as she worked, but I found little joy in it, especially the pulling of ‘weeds’. My Dad lived (and still does) about as far from nature as one could and it wasn’t until my adolescent years that my Mom began remembering her own connection to the land through gardening and caring for chickens. Within these primary relationships I got a mixture of influential beliefs about our natural world, many rooted in fear and disconnect, and not a whole lot of teachings on how to grow or identify our own food. This skill of feeding oneself from the land didn’t feel important to me until I reached my mid 20’s, at which point this ‘not knowing’ began to feel like an ache.

I began learning to identify plants, beyond the blackberries which were about all I was familiar with in the wild for years. Through my Mom and Oma I had learned about tending chickens for eggs and while living on a farm property expanded into tending chickens and ducks to be harvested for meat, a life changing experience. I danced between city and country living, but gardening remained largely inconsistent beyond helping in someone else’s or lots of potted plants and garden boxes on an urban patio. 

Then after years of longing, visioning and clarifying, my feet landed in a place where we could begin to grow our own food, a desire I was holding not just for myself but now for our children, so they would have a bit less to piece back together, and thank goodness they seem to enjoy gardening far more than I did as a child.

When I first saw this piece of land where our garden now sits I thought it was simply too much to clear. It was impossible to walk into, guarded by brambles with their endless thorny vines and thick grassy bushes all blending into one another in a jumbled mess. It would have been far easier, even if wildly less satisfying, to get some planter boxes and call it good. But the ache was strong and our garden visions were well alive, beckoning us to the work. When looking at a project that appears overwhelming one just needs to pick a place and start, so that’s what we did. Cut, dig, pull, repeat.

Some plants were easy to draw out with their shallow roots while others were thick and ran in multiple directions with incredible lengths. Some roots snapped when grabbing them making it near impossible to completely remove. As I pulled these roots from the land, in a movement meditation, beliefs and patterns began presenting themselves to my conscious mind to be unearthed and witnessed.

I saw ways of shrinking and keeping myself from the fullness of joy and love, ‘because who knows what potential unknown or disaster is around the corner’. I breathed into lineage wounds of wartime upheaval, holding tender awareness for how this plays out in my own apprehension to deepen my roots into place, ‘for maybe we’ll have to pull them up unexpectedly’. All of it showing up to be seen on this piece of land I was tending without letting myself love it completely as I had no clue of how long we would be here, which is somewhat comical in the grand scheme because we never know how long we’ll be anywhere. I saw it in my relationships with people and with life as a whole. ‘Protections’ that keep us from fully knowing the goodness, the incredible love, because holy shit it hurts when it goes. ‘Protections’ that inadvertently keep us from Life.

Cut, dig, pull, see with a little more clarity, repeat.

We continued this process for days, finding an equal mixture of plastic, bits of garbage, and medicinal herbs. The more we cleared the space, the more I could see myself reflected in this piece of land. Earth, our great mirror.

Bits of plastic ‘out of sight out of mind thinking’. Powerful herbs that ignite hope and give maps towards wellness. Discarded bits buried, only to resurface. Trees of comfort and wisdom. Life sustaining soil that holds it all.

All of it existing, in all of us, with all of us.

Even as I could see our humanness in this land, the plastic and trash angered and saddened me. I desperately wanted to get every little bit out and sat for hours filling buckets, it was an endless pit and still months later I’m finding bits and pieces, but after spending days and days pulling these massive and tiny pieces from the land I finally surrendered. Never would I ever get it all out. This land would not be cleared of this debris completely, at least not for many generations. 

For years I have wanted to purify myself, and I saw how the somewhat unbalanced enthusiasm I met the land with was similar to how I tackled my own vessel. Raised on the factory farm and processed American diet combined with teen and young adult years of partying and being unkind to my body in many ways, there was, in my mind, a lot to ‘purify’ and heal. 

But as I looked on this piece of land and surrendered to the truth that the task of removing every reminisce of the past, every bit of plastic, was bottomless, I also surrendered into all of this within my own being. This holy body. Pores filled with ink. Exposed to who knows how many ‘forever chemicals’. Having chosen a rough path for a good bit of the journey. Hospital born, formula fed. On and on and on.

And still it nourishes us and heals us. Still it grows and sustains life. Still it is beautiful messy perfection.

Earth’s body, our body.

As I communed with the land Her words arose like balm to my being.

“No way of eating, nothing will heal you more than this, than having your hands in the dirt and remembering these ways.”

“There is no purity in the physical, that belongs to soul. You can never be pure, and you are nothing but pure.”

The more I willingly showed up, the more She spoke. The more I accepted my own divine mess, the more I knew my wholeness. Eventually a beautiful patch of dirt became visible, that perfect Earthly potential for seed visions under the chaos.

And this rhythm continued for weeks: cut, dig, pull, see with a little more clarity, repeat. We pulled countless plants, roots, beliefs, and patterns that eventually there was little holding it all together, so here we were with a full on mud pit, the mushy caterpillar in the cocoon. Boots getting stuck in the muck, rakes caked and of little help, the place where our garden would be was well defined, held together by the surrounding stones and shrubs, but the land, our beings needed time to settle before any seeds could be planted.