It’s the placement of the garden fork that undoes me.
As I stand, paralysed by the fear of stunting the lanky growth of a carrot, I ponder whether it is a design flaw in these subterranean treasures, or whether it is a design flaw in me?
That my garden fork anxiety is the multitude of decisions we do, and don’t, make in most seconds of the day. Some of which are inconsequential. And some of which stop time, shrink lives.
A further digging into the throw-away culture that consumes our earth; the cleaved potato on my fork becomes the momentary bauble that distracts from the barrenness of our twenty-first century soul.
An echoed tremor from blighted times, when wretched earth deformed sustenance; a reminder that our deepest hopes, our best hopes, do sometimes fail.
A question of whether the pierced sacrifice of that first wee potato, for the good of its greater clan, is indeed darkening our senses in the current chaos. That sometimes fear makes us smaller not stronger. Stunting our vision of how we might better be.
Or could my three-pronged dilemma also be the fear of striking out in to that which I don’t yet know, the life that drifts beyond my ken.
The come-hither allure of an energy I feel (oh how gloriously I feel it) but can neither explain nor prove. And the desperate desire to run screaming from the idea that it might be more than simply the energy of all that was, is and shall be; and may, instead, be a lifeforce (oh rational brain be quiet) of some not insignificant meaning and quite marvelous mystery.
Or perhaps there is simply an old gardener’s trick that has yet to be muttered under breath, underground, for me to hear.
Along with the wisdom, pull the horseradish now love, it’s at its most delightful.
Stardust Becoming 