Garden Scraps - 2022

During the pandemonium, we got into backyard gardening. Our garden in Bradford was heavily shaded and we only planted tomatoes, not expecting much. We were right. Each plant grew to great proportions, but there wasn’t enough light to bring them to maturity. When we moved to Newmarket in the fall of 2020, we didn’t have the same backyard access (rental) so we only planted a few flowers on the front porch (summer 2021). This summer (2022), I got into some amateur woodworking and made a few planters out of scrap wood. They look half-decent. Some people would call them rustic.

We planted tomatoes, onions, a celery (from a previous stalk), peas, cucumbers, and a variety of other flora. They all turned out quite well, though I made the critical mistake of not creating sufficient drainage for the planters. That led to root rot for both the tomatoes and cucumber, but luckily we had gotten most of the harvest before the disease set in. Next spring, I’m going to remove the soil, add some drain rock, and fabric, and re-fill before we plant again.

Withing These Walls Blog Series Part 3

For most of our lives, we all do roughly the same thing every day. We spend energy to acquire energy. Every living creature on this planet does just that; it is our common thread and the base mode of existence. But we humans are a little bit interesting, a little bit different from our fellow beings. In the course of our lives, we like to create culture. In the last two posts I presented and told stories of the culture I believed was reflected in the items I found.

During demolition, I found the mummified carcass of a rodent along with a few eaten walnuts, and bedding. The items I had found to this point were all human artifacts that told a rich story of living, albeit most of the richness came from my own inference. I was now holding the remnants of a creature which had lived its entire life alongside the humans that had occupied this house. What story could be told of this rodent? It didn’t leave much behind for me to infer from. It had no culture which it could call upon to symbolize its beliefs, desires, values, accomplishments or failures, and its hopes for the future. All it left behind is evidence that it lived the very base existence I mentioned earlier. It expended energy to acquire energy.

The funny thing is, all these objects of significance which we mass-create and leave behind don’t mean anything to any of the other creatures on this planet. Much of our cultural tokens end up in landfills. Comparatively, we make up an insignificant portion of the diversity of life on Earth. Yet we have a psychological complex which compels us to live beyond basic survival, and recently, go as far as try to expand our species beyond this planet. That, to me, is both extremely fascinating and paradoxically pointless. No matter what course our lives take, on an individual level we all meet the same end. In the span of a few decades the house in question and all that’s left in it will be demolished and tossed in the trash. It will “die”. In the context of geological time, we will die, our cultures will die, and our history will die; all lost to the passing of time. I digress.

Yet, I am not a pessimistic person or hopeless nihilist. I am quite the opposite, in fact. Finding this mummified rodent compelled me to think about the fleeting experience of life in a positive manner. Despite the fact that in the broader context, life in the known universe has a limited time span, and that we will likely occupy the shortest span of most species, we have been “gifted” with an opportunity to experience life on Earth with increased capacity for perception and reflection. This means that we have the privilege to affect how we experience life, both by how we think about it and how we live it. We have the great privilege and responsibility to treat each other and our environment with respect, compassion, understanding and tolerance, to name a few virtues. We can “see into the future” and adjust our behaviour to live more sustainably with not just the natural environment and resources, but with each other. In other words, we can care for our current and future selves.

In recent years, specifically 2019 to present day (6 Mar 2022, as of this writing), we find ourselves facing “unprecedented times”. However, as I was doing research to inform my writing for this series, I couldn’t help but feel like the events I mentioned previously (Great Depression, WW2, etc.,) were eerily similar in style and order to the events we are facing in our current time. I cannot and will not make comparisons, but I can say that whatever troubles we face now are troubles we have the capacity to overcome. The problems of the world (the whole world, not just ours) are constantly being addressed by dedicated groups of people. Though it may seem we are going nowhere, we are improving. As individuals, we owe it to ourselves and to those we love to continuously strive to be better.

By ensuring we maintain our personal integrity, we can contribute to the integrity of our social groups. A little difference multiplied by many makes a big difference. In your actions day-to-day, do what you can to slightly improve something around you. In the scope of your life, attempt to improve the human condition both in how you speak and what you do. You won’t succeed in this task every day, I know I don’t, but you must try. I have made the mistake of believing I was not part of the world, like I was too insignificant to make any impact; because I was not educated enough, or successful enough, or not in a position of social or political authority. I was wrong. I have a responsibility to live life virtuously despite my position within natural or social hierarchies. We all have this responsibility, and if we do it with honour, we can leave behind more than just cultural artifacts. We can leave behind a better world, and that may just be “the meaning of life”.