Carrots Will Break Your Heart
I was thinking of writing this one for the CSA newsletter but I am not sure it is appropriate, actually. In general we try not to complain much in the newsletter. We are strong, optimistic, and successful in our story-telling, for the most part. So this one may need some work before it goes out into the world of customers.
Long ago when I was an avid new Jew, spending a lot of time studying and learning what was really a new language (and I don't mean Hebrew), I went to a Shabbat workshop led by a wise and eloquent woman. Of course now I cannot remember the point of that session, but I do remember one question she asked -- "what in your life lets you know that God is there?" This one kind of stumped me because I am not a God thinker. I had lived my life without that question, and had not felt anything missing. But the answer I came up with was carrots. Specifically, the act of pulling a carrot out of the ground. Not knowing what was there, and finding a thing of beauty hiding under the soil. I reasoned that there are many mysteries in life, and God must be part of those mysteries.
Twenty years later, I understand that it is far more complicated than that. Now I see that carrots can just break your heart as easily as bring you joy. Maybe that can still be the same with God, if I want to hold onto that idea. I am not sure that people tend to think of God as a heartbreaker, but life sure is, and for sure carrots are.
So, most of you don't much think about how hard it can be to grow carrots. A quick tutorial. They are grown from seeds. The seeds are tiny. It takes 100 days to grow a carrot, if all goes well. They are extremely finicky about the conditions for germination. As often as not, we will plant a field of carrots and they will never come up. This year we did everything as perfectly and carefully as we could -- we saved some ground specifically for carrots and rested it for 18 months, we planted a summer cover crop after the winter cover crop was finished, we tilled it down in a timely manner, we prepared the soil until it was a fluffy and perfect bed, we planted the seeds with the most expensive and precise piece of seeding equipment we own, and we set up the irrigation and watered so the seeds would come up. We waited. We kept watering. We waited and watched. And they really didn't come up. It was probably too hot and the water probably created just enough of a crust on the soil that the tiny little thready plants just couldn't quite push through, if they even tried.
So we planted another patch, and another. We are still watching and waiting. It reminds me of the stories I hear about people who are trying to get pregnant. How powerless they feel, and how every moment things could change.
I tilled in some of the first planting and decided to try to rescue the rest of it, even though there was only one carrot plant every foot or so, in some places. It was really not an economically viable act, to weed them, but it is also really hard to imagine having no carrots at all. It was a steamy hot day and it was satisfying to kill those fluffy weeds (that came up because of the irrigation, they would never have come up without the gift of water) just by flipping their little roots out into the air. They died instantly. The trouble is, of course, that carrots are extremely flimsy and they also died instantly if their roots got exposed by accident.
The carrots that germinated were holding on by a thread because they are threads themselves. They have one single root, and Michael observed that they were on a "death raft." In many cases the root was started in a clump of dry soil, a raft that was easy to dislodge and impossible to secure again once set adrift. I had never considered this phrase before, and since I was already in a state of some despair, I realized that our need for positive thinking helps us to see the life rafts, but not the death rafts.
And then of course I started to think of all the people I know who are basically holding on to their death rafts as they float down the river. Oh, carrots can break your heart when they start you down the path of existential thinking.
Last year we struggled to grow anything at all, but in the end we had a wonderful field of carrots, probably because we were growing in monsoon conditions. This year we are having much nicer weather, up until about a month ago, and yet we may need to face a carrot-less fall and winter.
If there is a God, God does not really care about making things go the way we want them to. That is not the role God plays. This is why my version of God thinking has moved away from carrots and more toward the spaces between us all. Humans and human life are complicated and hard too but somehow it doesn't seem quite as far outside our power to make it all work. We can't keep people off the death rafts but we can go with them as far as possible, and sometimes accompanying them is as powerful and meaningful as we can ever imagine.
See, this is just too dark for the CSA newsletter. I will let you know if any miracles happen, but this is not a good time for carrots or anything that hates hot soil. Don't let me get started on the brassicas, which are really struggling in this weather. It's August that breaks a farmer's heart, more often than not. Only a few more days until September...
Long ago when I was an avid new Jew, spending a lot of time studying and learning what was really a new language (and I don't mean Hebrew), I went to a Shabbat workshop led by a wise and eloquent woman. Of course now I cannot remember the point of that session, but I do remember one question she asked -- "what in your life lets you know that God is there?" This one kind of stumped me because I am not a God thinker. I had lived my life without that question, and had not felt anything missing. But the answer I came up with was carrots. Specifically, the act of pulling a carrot out of the ground. Not knowing what was there, and finding a thing of beauty hiding under the soil. I reasoned that there are many mysteries in life, and God must be part of those mysteries.
Twenty years later, I understand that it is far more complicated than that. Now I see that carrots can just break your heart as easily as bring you joy. Maybe that can still be the same with God, if I want to hold onto that idea. I am not sure that people tend to think of God as a heartbreaker, but life sure is, and for sure carrots are.
So, most of you don't much think about how hard it can be to grow carrots. A quick tutorial. They are grown from seeds. The seeds are tiny. It takes 100 days to grow a carrot, if all goes well. They are extremely finicky about the conditions for germination. As often as not, we will plant a field of carrots and they will never come up. This year we did everything as perfectly and carefully as we could -- we saved some ground specifically for carrots and rested it for 18 months, we planted a summer cover crop after the winter cover crop was finished, we tilled it down in a timely manner, we prepared the soil until it was a fluffy and perfect bed, we planted the seeds with the most expensive and precise piece of seeding equipment we own, and we set up the irrigation and watered so the seeds would come up. We waited. We kept watering. We waited and watched. And they really didn't come up. It was probably too hot and the water probably created just enough of a crust on the soil that the tiny little thready plants just couldn't quite push through, if they even tried.
So we planted another patch, and another. We are still watching and waiting. It reminds me of the stories I hear about people who are trying to get pregnant. How powerless they feel, and how every moment things could change.
I tilled in some of the first planting and decided to try to rescue the rest of it, even though there was only one carrot plant every foot or so, in some places. It was really not an economically viable act, to weed them, but it is also really hard to imagine having no carrots at all. It was a steamy hot day and it was satisfying to kill those fluffy weeds (that came up because of the irrigation, they would never have come up without the gift of water) just by flipping their little roots out into the air. They died instantly. The trouble is, of course, that carrots are extremely flimsy and they also died instantly if their roots got exposed by accident.
The carrots that germinated were holding on by a thread because they are threads themselves. They have one single root, and Michael observed that they were on a "death raft." In many cases the root was started in a clump of dry soil, a raft that was easy to dislodge and impossible to secure again once set adrift. I had never considered this phrase before, and since I was already in a state of some despair, I realized that our need for positive thinking helps us to see the life rafts, but not the death rafts.
And then of course I started to think of all the people I know who are basically holding on to their death rafts as they float down the river. Oh, carrots can break your heart when they start you down the path of existential thinking.
Last year we struggled to grow anything at all, but in the end we had a wonderful field of carrots, probably because we were growing in monsoon conditions. This year we are having much nicer weather, up until about a month ago, and yet we may need to face a carrot-less fall and winter.
If there is a God, God does not really care about making things go the way we want them to. That is not the role God plays. This is why my version of God thinking has moved away from carrots and more toward the spaces between us all. Humans and human life are complicated and hard too but somehow it doesn't seem quite as far outside our power to make it all work. We can't keep people off the death rafts but we can go with them as far as possible, and sometimes accompanying them is as powerful and meaningful as we can ever imagine.
See, this is just too dark for the CSA newsletter. I will let you know if any miracles happen, but this is not a good time for carrots or anything that hates hot soil. Don't let me get started on the brassicas, which are really struggling in this weather. It's August that breaks a farmer's heart, more often than not. Only a few more days until September...
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