Garlic Inspired Epiphanies on the Masculine and Me

(The back story:  Jay at Cookeville’s “Burgess Fall’s Nursery” introduced me to growing garlic in the fall of 2009. For those unfamiliar with garlic's magic, garlic is self-sowing meaning one clove left in the earth after 8-9 months becomes a cluster of cloves or a head of garlic. My first bed wasn’t as successful as I hoped yet this past winter I found green garlic shoots from that first attempt emerging several inches high in a pile of crunchy brown fall leaves.  This inspired me to buy more garlic from Jay and try, try again.  Here’s the "harvest" thus far from this year’s bed.)

The heads from which the planted cloves came.

Just about every morning, I start or conclude my run by surveying the 3 by 3 foot garlic bed in the front yard.  For over two months, I’ve watched this small plot of Mother Earth where I planted several cloves as night arrived on December's Winter Solstice.  (I had read that garlic thrived when planted on the year’s longest night.)

That evening the neighbors, whose driveway is nearest the garlic, were outside too.  I happily explained my project and promised them the gift of summer garlic. 

Recently I counted twenty five shoots of green and thought of those neighbors.  My first thoughts were 'If I give one row away and we eat one row, the third and final row can be saved and re-sown. Hmm, that means I personally will only get 6-8 cloves of my home grown garlic to last a season.'

Then instead of imagining happily braiding heads to keep and give away I found my dormant or undeveloped mathematician crunching numbers.  The scene inside my head went something like this:

“If each head has minimally six cloves then I need to save 4 of these 25 heads to ensure I’ve the same number for next year.  If I’m going to share, maybe I need to double my yield.  Then I need 8 for 48.  Unless I sow my entire yard in garlic, then I need ten times that amount if not more.  Maybe I should save a few extra this summer in case some heads don’t yield six cloves or in case they’ve fungus.  Does garlic get fungus?  What if the new bug down the street likes garlic greens?”

These thoughts all came quickly and quietly so much so that I stopped and literally asked, ‘Who is this residing in my head?  Who is this me not wanting to share garlic's magic, but instead is strategizing how to increase next year’s yield while insuring myself against unforeseen problems and potential pestilence?  And what are these feelings swimming subtly beneath my awareness?’

Suddenly I intuitively knew these feelings of exuberance, pressure, scarcity, fear and hope were feelings of the masculine especially of farmers long ago.

Stirring in me were aspects of the loving masculine desiring to feed and sustain family, first on the farm then in the greater community.  I realized how with that desire came pressure and vulnerability born of the fear of failing to feed everyone.  For our agrarian ancestors generations ago, failing to grow enough for whatever reason could result not only in hunger but in the death of a loved one.  I realized the temporary yet overzealous, driven fantasy to plant my entire yard in garlic was an attempt to control this primal fear. 

It had never occurred to me in my modern life how frightened and vulnerable farm folk and especially men must have felt in early days when drought occurred, insects arrived and blight or fungus appeared.  Making their predicament even more challenging was the fact that our pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kin weren’t encouraged to own personal vulnerability.  This may partially explain why so many of our ancestors in rare photos look back at us with such grim, expressionless stares. 

I judge the patriarchy or much of mankind for its disconnect from Mother Earth, yet standing in my yard, I understood how industrialization’s tools to make farm life easier and ensure production appealed to the vulnerable farmer and easily took root.  I was shown how I too disconnect and that residing in my shadow is the same capacity for lack of awareness that's contributed to the paradigm of mankind having dominion over Earth' soil and nature.  I sensed how with advent of modern machinery and corporations chemicals one could feel god-like and be consumed with growing more and more while simultaneously disconnecting from Mother Earth and forgetting Nature’s role in the process of gardening. 

Most telling to me was how seeing the fruits of inspiration that started in my heart activated fear and sent me to my head.  Visually seeing what I created changed things.  Fear prompted me to worry as to whether I had enough.  Fear began calculating, trading the joy in growing things for needing and wanting to produce more.  Just as quickly I someone who’s appreciative of Nature forgot the rain, sun and soil.  My digging 25 small holes was a minor role compared to the elements continued presence.   

I’ve now a sense of the ease with which we’ve gotten to this place where we’ve forgotten our relationship with and reliance upon the earth.  And I’ve a greater compassion and understanding for the masculine in men and women, the masculine’s capacity for action born of desire and love and the accompanying feelings of vulnerability and fear.

This small bed of garlic regardless of its yield has already provided a harvest, a harvest of insight nourishing me internally so I better understand myself and the masculine in my past and present kin.

-Dawn, The Good News Muse 8 March 2012

dawn@imaginetheshift.com