During the month of August I went to Seattle for the American Community Garden Association annual meeting. It was a reaffirming meeting with lots of helpful workshop information about how to be a better community gardener, how to work with the city, how to work with limited resources, and how to work with our neighbors.
People all over the country seem to have the same issues and some of the same answers, but it was the creative, fresh approaches that gave everyone at the conference a "WOW, why didn't I think of that?" More on that later.
The keynote speaker at the conference was a Muckleshoot Native American woman named Valerie Segrest. She stayed true to herself and delivered with an intelligent dry humor. She talked about how her tribe lived on a mountain plateau between the Green and White Rivers.
I failed to comprehend why she didn't say she lived near Seattle, which was named for an American Indian Chief. Valerie has been doing her graduate work on a food sovereignty project to decolonize Muckleshoot diets, which focuses on the tribe's access to tribal food such as elk, salmon, huckleberries and stinging nettle, which Valerie said was so nutritious that it made kale look like iceberg lettuce. She described a diet varied with exotic sounding berries and herbs native to the place between two rivers.
The Muckleshoots poached wild salmon in skunk cabbage and had Shoot Festivals where the people on the plateau between two rivers celebrated the return of spring greens. These small daily and seasonal activities included a deep relationship with their nourishing and healing gardens.
Valerie listened to her gardens located on the western slopes of a mountain range, known as The Cascades, overlooking Puget Sound, and heard her gardens demand things.
Her gardens demanded water. They asked for more plants to show up and be companions to them. One day, her garden demanded a festival.
I laughed at this thought, but now I listen and respond to my garden in a way that is not imposing what I want on it. In fact, after this talk I met a fellow conference attendee soaking up the Seattle sun and smiling with contentment. She called out and commented that Valerie's talk was very calming.
All of us at the conference were community organizers. We all speak the language of "We want... We need... This is so important." It is profound wisdom to listen and respond to what the earth is telling us and what its needs are.
Mother Earth is our Elder in our global village and she has wisdom with which to guide us.
As I was flying home to South Florida, I looked over the crop circles some where in the Midwest that spread like giant green polka dots against a brown and gray backdrop of dirt and rock, and I got it. I got it in a way that if I were in a comic strip, there would have been a bubble over my head with my thoughts. "POW WOW," it would say "I GOT IT!"
I thought that I was flying home to Palm Beach County Florida. I had told everyone at the conference that was where I am from. It emphasized the distance that I had traveled to attend this Seattle gathering and the importance it had for me.
But now I realize that my sacred space, the place where I wash my hair, prepare my meals and lie down to dream, is not a place that I could describe in political terms like "Delray Beach" or "Lake Worth," or "Palm Beach County, Florida."
Those are colonial terms that describe a social and political history of this area that is only a hundred years old.
My scared space is much older than that. This place by the sea, at sea level, has been here for a million years. Now when people ask where I live, I recite like a mantra that I live by the sea. It connects me with geology. It connects me with water, salt, stars, air, wind and lets me know that my little grain of sugar sand space is a particle of space and time and I am a respectful custodian of it.
Of course, here at The Park Catalog, we use our postal address of Boca Raton, as that is the address of business, but my sacred space, the place where I lie down to dream- is by the sea.
The physical particles of sturdy minerals where I listen to the big blow of hurricanes, where I feel the wind's gentle breeze , and that I stand on to breath in the water laden air, is at sea level . Connecting with that fact lets me know every day, that at any moment my scared space can wash away, sweeping me into the sands of time and burying my icons or pictures of my family. Sending me floating past road signs that say "Delray Beach This Way."
By really connecting with where I am I understand the tension of my fragile relationship with where I am. I am better able to listen to the demands my garden of Eden has for me.
Thank you Muckleshoot Indian Elder Woman for giving me my POW WOW moment.