As many of you know, I’m South African, and Eugene is Korean-American. Eugene’s family lives in S. Korea, so it takes effort make sure our kids connect with their grandmother, uncle and extended family. For just over one week, we found ourselves in a completely different environment, in Singapore.

While acknowledging the incredible privilege of flying, I find it difficult to leave home. I’m a bit co-dependent with the farm. It’s also psychologically challenging. We encounter a world in which people live completely differently from us, and are remarkable in their own ways. Our perspectives can be so small, the world is so big.

It’s ok for our perspectives to be small but deep. We cannot understand everything everywhere, but we can know that our perspectives are both grounded and limited.

Perhaps we can extrapolate from attachment theory: If we can integrate a deep and secure attachment to home, we are not afraid that the big wide world will ruin or change us. We are free to explore both the specific and the universal in all its glory. As Virginia Woolf said, “I am rooted, but I flow.”

What does it mean to be rooted but connected to the universal? I’d love to hear your perspectives, as I am not sure I have the words for this yet. Perhaps we know it when we see it: Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu.

Urban, western, educated people may sometimes be stuck in a form of universality that can be quite shallow, and quite capitalist. We jump to the universal before being fully rooted in the local.

For plants, even the need for water, nutrients, light varies a lot. What is good for a banana is not good for a plum. What is universal is that a plant thrives in an environment where its unique needs are met. To understand and meet those needs is to be a great gardener/farmer/steward. A great steward can’t necessarily grow everything, everywhere, all the time. They can create the right conditions for specific plants, OR find the right plants for the conditions that already exist where they are. It is always a local, context specific task. The great steward decides what constitutes good growing conditions, or good enough for the scale they require, the weather conditions and resources they have access to.

Singapore grows a lot of food in super technological ways, it’s a tiny densely populated island attempting to grow 30% of it’s food by 2030. Here, it’s interesting to speculate on what we know or don’t know about food, through the lens of highly controlled tech-oriented solutions. All the unknown unknowns. Choices are being made all the time about what is good enough, and what constitutes progress, given an urgent need for resilience.

The universal is perhaps just acknowledging that people are making the best growing choices they can given their current knowledge and context, and being curious about that context.

We can open tiny windows of opportunity to explore alternatives. To be a great steward is always to be willing to care for what is immediate, without too much judgement.

Here’s to becoming more rooted, and to being curious and present to the needs of our plants and the people who cross our paths.

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