In this world of information overload, it’s easy to idealise certain stories, certain people, certain ways of being. In this natural process of idealising, striving, and mourning our shortcomings, we can miss out on the fact that the small and large failures of our lives are normal and precious. We get caught up with the latest growing fad, as if some special product or idea will fix everything.

I don’t think any product or idea will fix everything. Rather, awakening to the biological life in the soil, tapping into that, paying attention and shaping things where we can, over many years, will yield both food and a depth of understanding.

Our mistakes, inattention, moments of overwhelm are core to the human condition, and core to our growing. I was reading a biography of Dorothy Day recently and was struck by how ordinary she was in her struggles, and also how extraordinary in her service. That is probably all of us, right? Good in some things, not so great in others.

Many of us struggle when we discover growing is exponentially harder than we thought it would be. If we’ve put a lot of energy into our new identity as growers, we can even be embarrassed or ashamed when we lose a crop or our garden looks bad. If we see only the surface of others’ lives, the best pictures or stories, we can even be upended by our failures, thinking them abnormal or proof that we don’t measure up.

But if we can face the mundane difficulty of feeding ourselves, we start to get back to basics. Not in a romanticised the-world-was-better-before kind of way, but in a woah-we-understand kind of a way. We can understand something so fundamental and mundane: that we can never grow perfectly or eat perfectly, but we can participate in life. Somehow, that begins to make the quirkiness and woundedness of people around us, and ourselves, more acceptable.

This understanding is also what can get us off the treadmill of consumption and wanting more. Not immediately, but over many years, if we allow ourselves to be changed.

Most of growing is just to keep working on it. To keep planting, watering, composting, harvesting. To dedicate part of our day to the mundane.

When faced with death, and life, and death again, we are not surprised by disease, pests or failures. We are not as surprised or angry when the world is not ideal.

We just keep observing, experiencing, connecting to the mundane bits of our life, and these are also the most sacred. Because there is nothing more than to live and stay alive and connect with our loved ones and stay open to our community.

Here’s to growing together! If you’re in Cape Town, spend a little time this week removing downed/rotting vegetable leaves after the recent storm- the outer leaves of your spinach, cabbage etc- as those leaves will sometimes become a gateway for things wanting to eat your veg…

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