We Build.

I have heard it said—well, to be honest, I have seen it float by on a Facebook meme—that to garden is to have hope. 

 

The early days

I have a garden.  I have black eyed peas, and cantaloupe, and carrots and beets, and of course eggplant.  I have a whole plot of squash and pumpkins that are overrun with squash beetles because I didn’t know what I was happening, I didn’t understand the problem, so I didn’t do anything about it.  They are going to die because nothing was done in time. 

They are going to die because nothing was done in time.

Everything else is doing great. 

I have a garden.  They say that is hope.

It is hard, sometimes these days, to have hope.  I have been taking it easy on social media recently, so I missed El Paso and Dayton until after the fact.  Not far after, but I caught them both at once, not as they happened.  Same thing had happened with the Garlic Festival, a few days before.  And while these things were happening, I was just…living.  Being a friend, having friends.  Being a spouse, having a spouse.  Being a worker and going to work.  Having nice days.  Trying to have nice days.

It is hard to look at the world right now and understand what is happening, and what the correct response is.  It is hard for me to look at all the things screaming out, and know what the correct thing to do is.  I mean, outrage and disapproval are clear correct responses.  To more mass shootings, to race baiting from on high, to children in cages and internment camps made in my name as a US citizen.  Yes.  Outrage, and disapproval. 

But that’s not an action. 

That’s a feeling, a vast and righteous but also completely overwhelming feeling that doesn’t come with an instruction manual.  I’m going to vote, yes, but that sure doesn’t feel like a meaningful-thing-to-do-today action.  I give money where I can, but I can’t much.  I call when I can, but to be honest, I do it less than it demands.  I forget sometimes. I get busy, plusalso I don’t like it, and that’s shameful but it’s also true.  In the meantime, I try and live a life full of love, and to love radically.  But like…that’s not exactly putting your body up as the hurdle that injustice must climb over. 

And I don’t know what else to do.

So I go to the garden, and I ask myself, what am I building?

I try to build a marriage.  I try to build a village of love, support, acceptance.  I try to build hope.  I try to tend my garden. 

I am a fighter, but no one really wants to have to be the vanguard of justice.  I will, people will occupy that dangerous space.    But (and here it is) I’d so much rather not have to.  Not because it shouldn't be me, but because it shouldn't be.  Don’t they remember the ideals they taught me: freedom and justice for all?  Why don’t they remember?  Why isn’t it everywhere?  And then you pay attention to our history—why has it never been everywhere? 

I’m so tired.

So easy for me to say.  I am a white woman, middle aged now, with a good education and a salary job.  I understand that them being after any body is them coming after my own body.  I mean, they do

 come after my own body.  But these days, honestly, my body is safe.  I’m ok.  I can be tired after my work week and take the outrage off like a dress to spend my night or my weekend recharging in the safety of my life, my skin, my income, my social status.  I can shake my head, and be sad of it, and put it aside to have a game night with friends or be sure that I get enough sleep at night. 

While other people are being stopped by the police, are sleeping in cages apart from their kids, are in a hospital tonight riddled with bullets.  It’s not fair.  I know.  It haunts me, and it should.  That haunting is my burden to address, just like the old picture my papa once showed me of a picnic at my grandmother’s dad’s farm, with all the black people in the background.  “Who are they?” I asked.  “Oh, they lived there,” he said.  “At his house?” I asked.  “Back behind it," he said.  "They never left, you see."

“They were happy there,” he said.  

That is also my burden to address. 

Cheat code: If you just don’t address it? But you feel reeeeally sad about it tho?  You get to feel like you engaged while actually never doing anything that affected your life, or changed anyone else’s.  This is uncomfortably, factually true.  Even if you would do something if you knew what to do.  Even if your heartbreak is real.  Even if you cry out to do more if you only knew what in God’s name you could do.  Even if you are dying to be really, actively on the right side of this.  Even if you pray to use your body, mind, soul to build the dam that holds back the evil, the inhumanity, the hate.  Even if you thirst for it like eyes for beauty and souls for poetry and crops for rain.

So what do we build?  What do I do with my life, my privilege, my burden?  What is fair, when nothing is fair?  What is the next right step?

Where is my hope?  Well I guess it’s in my black-eyed peas, and my compost pile.  That’s a real but deeply saddening answer. 

Where is your hope?  Will you share it with me?

Where is our hope, for this country built on a dream I believe in?  Because you can’t believe but do nothing.  But what do you do?

I try to, as my mother always said, keep my side of the fence clean.  Do your part. The things that are definitely yours to do—do them.  I love my neighbor. I try to be a person who sees people as people, meets them in dignity and offers them respect.  But that doesn’t feel like activism, not on the scale that is required by our country.  

The situation demands so much more. 

What do we build?  When we are lied to, when we are betrayed by those in power, what do we build?  When the world is boiling, emotionally, spiritually, and physically?  When my little home in my little house is mostly ok but scared, and we are not even the people who need to be really afraid, and we know that?  What do we DO, when we are ready and willing but also constrained by the normal things of everyday life—work schedules, tight budgets, limited emotional capacity, my niece’s birthday party coming up, the cat’s vet appointment?  What do we DO, when we are willing but not always able?

I go to my garden.  They said it was hope.  I am trying to grow it.  I try and make the soil a little bit better, do something productive with what I have.  I love doing productive things.  I want to do something productive SO. HARD.

 

So I harvest my peas while kids still sleep in cages, people are in hospitals riddled with bullets, and a whole huge part of this country acts like everything is roses.  I drove by a billboard last week that said Trump Keeps His Promises, and someone paid for that billboard—is paying for it.  People have decided to hate other people and harm their bodies for it, and I’m not there.  I’m here, and safe, and sad. I can’t be there, El Paso, but I can bear witness. I am very aware that bearing witness is not enough. 

Bearing witness feels like the only tool in my toolbox these days. 

I go to my garden.  I will share my harvest with you.  I will humbly ask you to share fellowship with me. This is not the world we were tasked to build; I will be active in rebuilding it.  I will work.  I am a good worker.  

I will build.  I will try.  I will do what it takes.

I don’t know what to do.