#good soil

[queerpyracy]

When Tristan and I got married some years ago, my parents didn't attend our wedding. My mother wrote to say they couldn't, for theological reasons. The week of the ceremony, she emailed to say she was praying for good weather. Then, some months later, she emailed to ask if she could come visit us in New York. Actually, that's not quite accurate. She wanted to know whether I might like her to "come and cook a dinner for you for your birthday." She hadn't been to visit in years, not since Tristan and I moved in together. She'd met him only once, and that meeting had been incredibly awkward. Food is the language my family speaks when Cantonese, English, and Chinglish all fail us. We can say with food what we can't with spoken words. As a kid, on the too-common occasions when I got in trouble with my dad at the dinner table for talking back, my grandmother would just spoon another favorite dish onto my plate. This is how she showed her solidarity. This was also her diplomatic way of suggesting that I just shut up and eat. [...] Food is the thing we can always talk about when we have nothing else. If I'm at a loss for something an always ask her what she and my dad have been eating. And I can always ask--genuinely, because I always want to know--how to cook a particular dish of hers. Through food, my mother says things she can't in words. Sometimes a box will unexpectedly arrive on Tristan's and my doorstep. Inevitably it's packed with food: cans of abalone she has brought back from Hong Kong; dried scallops and dried mushrooms she worries I am too cheap to buy myself; preserved ginger, which is good for expelling gas and soothing coughs; bags of dried apple slices, made with fruit from a friend's trees, which she has sent regularly ever since I told her Tristan loves them. When my mom arrived in New York to cook that birthday meal first things she did was to pull a gift out of her bag: an antique pair of ivory chopsticks. Everyone in our family has a pair, inscribed in red with our names. These were for my husband. My mom told him it was my job to figure out where to get the inscription done. I reminded her it was also her job to help me come up with a Chinese name for the white boy. Years later, I can tell you, she still hasn't. But we have those chopsticks.

Jeff Chu, Good Soil

[entomo-maniac]

Able be like

practically a walking corpse Able, my beloved

[soaringeaglesingingjoy]

But as for that seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word with a good and noble heart, and hold on to it tightly, and bear fruit with patience.

Luke 8:15 AMP

[alleycat4eva]

Anybody else look at land areas and be like... "That's some nice dirt you got..... That could be... My dirt."

[the-daily-dee]

Down And Dirty

[a-fix-of-muses]

Currently Listening To: "Good Soil, Bad Seeds" by A Lot Like Birds

[queerpyracy]

To name the soils that you come from is to acknowledge that you were not self-made, because there is no such thing as a self-made human. It places you in the context of an ecosystem. It confesses that you are a creature--simply, someone created by forces beyond you--which is to say reared and scarred and sanded and formed. It admits that you are not some nebula floating in the ether but that you have roots and are inescapably interdependent with the world around you. It's laughable to me that the verb form of the word "soil" somehow came to be associated with filth, given how necessary it is for life. The Jewish and Christian creation myths describe humankind as having originally been made from soil. The Ojibwe say the same, as does one Chinese story--yellow clay, of course, shaped by the nimble hands of the goddess Nuwa. Soil can be denuded and degraded, and it can be nourished and amended. This, Nate told us, was our work to do at the Farminary--both literally, with the help of our compost pile, and figuratively, as we tended to our own spiritual lives. Together, we'd study the soils we came from, and we'd examine the growing conditions we were creating for others, and ourselves. Soil teems with so many lifeforms that help feed us. Scientists estimate that just one teaspoon of healthy topsoil can contain ten thousand different species of microbe--bacteria and protozoa, fungi and viruses. Without soil we wouldn't have so many of the things of modern life, including glass (sand), pottery (clay), and Scotch (peat). In this seminary class, we'd carefully examine the soils of our lives, identifying where we had flourished and where we had struggled. What characteristics had fostered our growth? How could we recognize poor spiritual soil?

Jeff Chu, Good Soil

[queerpyracy]

In the Bible, the wilderness never seems to belong to anyone, at least not in the long term. Armies might try to conquer the land, and colonizers might build their citadels. But in the ancient prophecies, nature serves as a patient agent of justice, ever ready to reclaim the bricks and turn them back to dust. The old oracles that warn of hyenas taking over a military tower or owls and ostriches finding places to nest can be read as warnings to humankind: Don't see yourselves as more powerful than you actually are. Don't think your structures are more permanent, your systems more resilient, than they actually are. "Mine" might be one of the most dangerously alluring words in the English language. We guard our possessions jealously. We seek deeds and titles to houses and cars, showing off what we've earned. Our societies celebrate the self-made billionaire, rarely examining the lie of independent wealth. After we sold our house and moved into a seminary apartment with a lovely little balcony overlooking woods, Tristan and I discovered the freedom of not owning the place. In exchange for our (heavily subsidized) monthly rent, we had precious few responsibilities beyond the electric bill. If something needed fixing, we went online and logged a request. A maintenance worker would show up within a day. Tristan found work at the indie bookstore in town. Make no mistake: It was still a job, one that came with some of the minor annoyances of customer service. But there, also, he felt the ease of lessened authority. There were no emails to answer, no work to take home with him at day's end, no burdens to be carried through the night and into the next morning. The farm, too, had never been mine and could never be mine. While I might be able to find belonging there (sometimes) and while I felt a growing sense of responsibility to tend it well, it could never belong to me. Fidelity could never be mistaken for ownership. To emphasize what's mine can be to underplay the importance of what's ours. The temptation toward self-sufficiency, self-importance, and indeed self-absorption is age old and universal; hence all the detailed rules and strikingly specific regulations about how to treat one's neighbor, not just in the Torah but also int he holy books of so many religions and the writings of so many philosophers. The idea of self-sufficiency can be such an alluring trickster. One day the previous fall, we had a surplus of produce on the farm, and I went around to some of the seminary offices, asking secretaries, deans, maintenance workers, and cleaners if they wanted any green beans or tomatoes or peppers. "They're from the Farminary!" I said, feeling like a door-to-door salesman. "They're free!" While a few people were delighted, I was surprised at how many responded with skepticism. Some looked askance at my overflowing basket; were there signs of rot in the produce? Or they quickly brushed me off, as if I'd insulted them by asking if they wanted free vegetables. "I don't need any food," one said, looking at me as if she wished she had a door to shut in my face. "Okay," I replied. Though really, I wanted to say, Do you know how sweet these tomatoes are? And these lunchbox peppers? They're delicious. I couldn't find enough takers, so eventually I left the produce on a table in the library's cafe, with a sign that said, "Free! Help yourself." Maybe when nobody else was looking, someone would take them.

Jeff Chu, Good Soil