eliot coleman

“The history of organic farming is similar to the history of any successful idea that diverges from the orthodoxy of the moment. The orthodoxy first tries to denounce it, then tries to minimize its importance, and finally tries top co-opt it.” – Eliot Coleman

hope…

“the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility.

to cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.”

 - wendell berry

everybody knows
everybody knows
everybody knows
you only live a day,
but it’s brilliant anyway

- elliott smith

the Seedkeeper

This morning I read a beautiful short story, Village 113 by Anthony Doerr. This story is found in his book of short stories, “Memory Wall.” Village 113 poetically describes the life of the Seedkeeper, an elderly seedswoman living in a small river village somewhere in Asia during a time where an immense dam is being constructed downstream. This is a beautifully written story, and I’d rather share a few excerpts from it than I would give the story away through my experience of it. My favorite passages, of course, have to do with seeds…

“She stands in her house and stares into the mouths of containers, watching little diamonds of light reflect off the smooth polish of seeds, their perfect geometries, their hibernal dreams.”

“Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”

“Maybe the river is already beginning to slack, to back up and rise. Maybe ghosts pour out of the Earth, out of the mouths of tombs up and down the gorges, out of the tips of twigs at the ends of branches. The fireflies tap against the glass. More than anything, she thinks, I’ll be sad to see the speed go out of the water.”

“She spreads a blanket across her table and upends containers of seeds onto it. Mustard tuber, pak choy, cabbage, eggplant, cauliflower. Millet, chestnut, radish. Her mother’s voice: Seeds are the dreams plants dream while they sleep. Seeds big as coins; seeds light as breath. They all go onto the blanket. When all the containers are empty she folds the corners of the blanket over each other and ties the whole thing into a bundle.”

“Her mother used to say seeds were links in a chain, not beginnings or endings, but she was wrong: Seeds are both beginnings and ends-they are a plant’s eggshell and its coffin. Orchards crouch invisibly inside each one.”