Garden Girl

Just one thing.
Find that one thing and do it passionately.

I saw a movie last night about a very idealistic, driven & lost young man who was named Chris McCandless. The movie is Into The Wild . He was a bright and sensitive soul, and after his college graduation he began tramping around the country living rough. He had lost his faith in people due to his parents abusive and volatile marriage and wanted nothing to do with the path they had set for him of social & economic ladder climbing.
Chris was inspired by reading Jack London & Thoreau. He liked solitude and introspection, traveling by his wits without possessions or safety nets, and testing his mettle.
He was, by all accounts, decent, honorable, a hard worker and gifted with a compassionate heart.
He hiked, without proper gear, alone into the Alaskan wilderness and due to his own ill preparedness and lack of knowledge, he died there.
One of the last statements in the notebook found with his body was this:
“Happiness is only real if shared.”

I resonate with what I know of Chris. Through most of my twenties, I too, disillusioned with and distrustful of what I perceived human nature to be, went on a walk about and like Chris, my privileged & yet emotionally crippling background didn’t prepare me for what I was to experience. The wilderness I wandered was urban, unlike Chris’, but there were dangers every bit as real as bears and starvation.

I’m glad that like Chris I found my answer, and I’m deeply happy that I survived to go on living that answer.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the glut of problems the world faces today. Easy to retreat from them, to hope someone else will solve it all, or to feel that one is too small a player on the world’s stage to be of use.
But for your own sanity and for the inspiration you will bring others, if for no other reasons, I urge you- find one thing you love to do that will help others as well and dive into it passionately.

For me, I think the garden I’m starting here will be that thing. First and foremost this will be a working food garden. A victory garden. I do have plans for wildflowers and weeds– probably a bed of them over the scarred ground contractors left by my office window. This will feed bees, so in a way, even that will be a food garden. Food for the soul, for sure.
Mainly, ‘tho. I want to focus on making my raised beds as bountiful as I can and finding ways to share that bounty and what I’ll learn in producing it with others.
Because, happiness is only real if shared.

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