**The End and the Beginning** | The last tomatoes of the season return home from their twine trellis while clover and thick grass mulch nourishes the soil so we may eat again next spring.

Part 3 of 4 | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4

Circular time? That may be hard to grasp. But consider for a moment the many human-constructed landscapes in which every plant is separated from every other plant. Why is this so? For ease of maintenance, so no “weeds” grow where they cannot be mowed, so it is “neat” and “tidy” and “organized.”

Translation?

Landscapes where all living things are isolated from another, where humans have dissected the integrity of life because it is uncomfortable to sit with complexity and the infinite wisdom of this universe. Linear, organized, one-by-one constructs make us feel in control. But humorously, behind our carefully manicured mirages, life keeps popping up in between the cracks. Life keeps connecting at the edges and margins, life keeps moving round and round.

Circularly.

If you can come to terms with such complexity, it is easier to understand how food flashes us to befores and yet-to-comes, food connects us very physically to what has been, and what is being. Food connects us to all the energy that has been set in motion to write the stories of that to be. Food holds a vast reservoir of wisdom and knowing. Can you see that each bite is rooted in place and story and history? Each bite instills the eater with a legacy and with a particular resonant energy which carries forward.

Margaret Atwood tackles what it means to eat in All B read. This is a difficult poem, but only because the truths she writes of are undeniable. These are truths that we farmers live and breathe but often find too uncomfortable to talk about in polite company. We eat and we are eaten; we are forever consumed.

Aside from total disconnection, we farmers have no choice but to be consumed. We hold the hard and the delicate, the deep loves and painful losses, the wildness and gentleness, the abundance and hunger, the scarcity and infinity. We hold these truths not linearly, not one by one, but at once, in our hands, in our hearts, in our singular bodies. We do not get to decide how the kaleidoscope of experiences will come. We only know they do not come discreetly, neatly packaged in single servings. Nothing is bite sized nor can be unwrapped piece by piece, sanitized from all else. We do not get to reschedule or postpone or ignore. Because all around us, behind the corners and under our feet and out of thin air, Life keeps connecting and weeping and laughing and moving round and round.

Whether or not we have the capacity to envision it through plants or through food, the moments of our lives are layered, one after another like a compost pile. In a good compost pile, the heat of the connections and experiences fracture what has been— these structures that held and restricted what we thought we knew. This is the potent alchemy of connection: a letting go- a releasing into elementality that births an informing, and a becoming. The compost pile is where we lay down and rise up together. Layer by layer, the infinite wisdom of all manner of connections is the genesis from which healthy, resilient homes and communities emerge.

Circular time - Life’s time- transforms and settles and wisens us, all while giving us the nourishing base from which to spring forth with new possibilities. ~AJ