Regeneration Generation
Summer is a season unlike any other. These salty, sunny days bring back nostalgia for childhood ice cream cones, bike rides, and sun-kissed freckled faces. Days seem endless and evocative of the sacred perfection that is life in its fullest form. Bare shoulders turning golden, mouths colored red by ripe strawberries, toes stained green from dancing in the grass. This season is aromatic, juicy, vibrant, shimmering, full of sun-drunk laughter and wild magic.
Joanna Macy is an environmental activist, author, and scholar of deep ecology. She said it more succinctly than I can, “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being.”
And so I find myself in my thriving summer garden, a witness to life and diversity beyond the scope of human register. All this life, all these insects, endless fistfuls of healthy, vibrant, living soil. Life and soil that I have so carefully cultivated by choosing methods of growing that work with nature and not against it. Our previous generations didn’t know, couldn’t fully comprehend, the end result of spraying pesticides and herbicides onto crops year after year. It was done to increase yields and eliminate the need for countless hours of human labor spent weeding and picking insects off plants. But now we have no excuse because now we know the outcome. The damage to our bodies, ecosystems, soil, and planet is deep, but not irreversible. I will be the ordinary person who does something to make a change out of my love for all the life I witness in my garden. I started each seed by hand. I spent hours watering, rotating, and nursing hundreds of plant starts. I planted each by hand without the use of fossil-fueled equipment. I weed by hand, pick off damaging insects by hand, and harvest by hand. Yes, of course there are more weeds and insects than I have the capacity to tackle alone, but I sit back and recognize that they add to the power and the beauty and the purity of what I am doing. After all, it is widely said that plants have stronger medicinal constituents when they face natural and wild challenges instead of a full life spent in a perfectly curated garden.
As dark comes on each night, seemingly sudden after a day full of so much light, I turn toward the lights of the farmhouse and a quiet type of peace comes over me, shifting and settling and covering. It’s a subtle feeling, a shift like that of the light between a summer afternoon and evening, playing in hues of golden yellow and ochre. The end of each day feels like a celebration, not because the day is done, but because of what I am fostering here in this sacred garden space, and I am full of anticipation to see what else has manifested into existence by the time I return to the garden gate int the morning.
My goal here at the farm and apothecary is simple: To give you products that work on a safer and deeper level than mass-produced products, and to grow and make them in a sustainable, earth-forward, regeneration centric way. Our products are proudly farm-to-cabinet, and they have played a part in healing the land instead of being a reason to further damage our land.
The frogs, cicadas, crickets, fireflies, rabbits and thousand other forms of life that bring the vibrancy and symphony to summer will find respite instead of war on our farm. Because sharing a safe space where all things can flourish is more important than saving that one tansy from that one deer. Summer is an explosion of life. This I will perpetuate intentionally with every choice I make.
-Jenn
