WORK OF THE EARTH

Got riled the other afternoon with the office over some common editorial hassles and I was at home so no point in sharing it there or stewing on it but if I just sat around my mind would turn it over and over, pushing the same aimless mindrock up the same pointless mindhill so I went out to the tool shed and got the rake, hoe and pitchfork, made another couple of garden rows and planted some carrots, which are immeasurably more important than anger, mean more than any argument, are nourishing and delicious, just as the tilling of earth and the enriching of soil are more important and meaningful than cultivating bitterness or digging up bad feelings.

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

When at the end of the day I looked upon the result, at those straight, dark, rich, seeded rows, at what I had shaped with my hands, my tools and the work of the earth, rows that soon enough would bear little green flags of hope, that in their time would grow to food, I had never been riled at all, it was just a useless imagining back there, spent in a dream from which I'd awakened some time ago.

If you're upset, plant something.