Growing Something New
This year, I’m trying to grow a lil garden on my balcony. I’ve never been really good at plants, they’re usually good for a couple weeks and then it feels like they just kinda give up.
But lately, the world is heavy. It feels like I’m stuck in place and that the world around me is slowly imploding, becoming a place that’s harder to see hope around the corner. And that’s a hard place to sit.
I’ve been reading Soil by Camille T Dungy. Something that she mentions is, “Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy.” So, as spring greeted us and I shook off a fairly hard winter, I began imagining what I could grow. I didn’t want too much, just enough for me and for sharing with friends. I have a balcony that doesn’t get a lot of sun but should get just enough to work for a couple easy to care for plants. But even then, I didn’t start working on my idea right away. I still felt… stuck. What if the plants didn’t grow? What if I didn’t actually get enough sun on my balcony? What if I failed to take care of them and my desire to grow something led to another failure?
Then, on a weekend with family, my uncle was walking me through his garden. He grows an incredible amount of food and it’s always inspiring to see what he’s able to cultivate over the season. I asked him what it was like to grow sweet potatoes. I’ll be honest with yall, I had a couple of sweet potatoes that I maybe didn’t use right away and had started throwing out a collection of searching roots, seeing if it could get away with maybe growing something on its own. He let me know that starting the roots was gonna be as simple as pulling off a couple of the roots and putting them in a container of water. Then it’d be up to me to find some dirt to plant them in. When I got home, that’s exactly what I did. Over the next couple of days, the sprouts transformed. Little white shoots filled the container. And so it was up to me. It was time to find some dirt to put them in.
Even then. Weeks passed before I actually started the process of planting. My older sister was in town and I’ve always looked up to what she’s grown on her balconies over the years. While she was here, we did some shopping and I picked up a lil self-watering planter, bought what I thought was an absurd amount of dirt, and 12 different plants and herbs. It’s been probably about a month since I planted everything and I haven’t forgotten to water them. I’ve got flowers on the jalapeños, the serranos, and one of the tomato plants. The mint is flourishing in a planter on its own. I’m proud.
The world feels suffocating. Personally, I feel stuck where I am without a direction on where to go next or how to help make things better. But, I have a small garden on my balcony. I’ve got my hands in the soil and I’m watching the plants grow. It’s a small thing but it reminds me that growth can still happen amidst everything that feels so unstable. And maybe. Just maybe, that means I can grow past this too. If I keep trusting that there are folk who care for me and continue imagining a world that could be different, maybe that future I keep thinking about could come true. Maybe there is actually a path out there for me that I’ll just have to stumble down for a little longer until I find where it’s leading. I have to trust that’s there. This lil garden has taught me that. We can grow when we’re taken care of. I can grow where I have the space and the sunlight and the care.
