I had the pleasure of sitting with a group of gardeners for a couple of hours yesterday.  My friend, Patti, invited us to her Snoqualmie Summer Winds Farm, to listen to Gary Kline speak about how to grow nutrient dense food with soil mineralization.

As a massage therapist with soft manicured hands – I bet I was the only “non-gardener” in the group.  Yet since we moved to the Snoqualmie Valley I’ve been hearing the call from some very different voices.

We’re lucky enough to buy a substantial part of our food from local farms.  I can’t describe the amazing taste – the food seems to have a quality of aliveness – an energy or prana as we say in yoga speak.   A few weeks ago I picked up Wendy Johnson’s “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate.”  I’ve been savoring a few pages every day.  As long time master gardener at the Green Gulch Zen Center, she writes about gardening as zen and zen as gardening.   It took her ten years to write her book out by hand.  You can tell.  Her prose rises up from the pages like plants growing from fertile soil.

Anyway – I’m grateful that I read the chapter on preparing the soil and soil pH.  Otherwise, I would have been totally lost.  Gary talked about “The Plan.”  When we approach living and gardening according to “The Plan,” we realize health and wellness mainly through the foods we eat. He took pains to distinguish nutrient dense foods from organic foods.  While organic foods are grown without toxic pesticides they don’t necessary contain the variety and balance of the nutrients, minerals and vitamins we need.  He questioned the exaggerated value of “organic foods” by saying the absence of a “negative” doesn’t necessary yield a positive.  That gave me something to think about.

He’s on a mission to recruit farmers and gardeners to join him in replacing what’s been depleted from the soil.  He described an approach – a bit beyond me at this point – that involves conditioning the soil to create a balanced pH and treating it with mineral rich fertilizer, charcoal and mulch.  These applications blanket the soil and attract earth worms who eventually carry nutrients down to the root level of plants that take them up through the worms excretions.  I know this is a vast oversimplification – you can learn so much more by contacting Gary if you’re serious about investigating this.  I hope to try it next year.

I believe he’s on to something.  Patti gave me a bushel of arugula that she grew using Gary’s approach.  I’m telling you it was the best salad I’ve ever eaten.   I had to have more.   I went out to PCC two days later and bought some very good looking organic arugula – also locally grown.  It didn’t taste the same.  It was good – but not as good as Patti’s.

I’m contemplating fertility these days.  I’ve been reading Naomi Wolf’s book, Vagina: a New Biography.  She explores “the mind-vagina connection” and “the role of female desire in female identity, creativity, and confidence, from interviewees of all walks of life.”  I have an aging vagina and a creative spirit so it’s got my attention.  Naomi refers to Tami Kent’s Holistic Pelvic Care which she describes in her book The Wild Feminine – which I am also reading now.  Both authors speak about the pelvis – our root center as a source of creativity and vitality.  Tami writes” What the pelvic bowl needs is good alignment in the organs and muscles, vibrant chi–or energy–and blood flow (which enhances cellular health and hormonal circulation), and a woman who is in touch with this powerful core energy to guide her life and give expression to her creative dreams.”

I’ve been thinking about the connection between the fertility of the soil and the pelvic bowl, the vagina.  It seems that our land stewardship practices have depleted our soil.  Have our contemporary life style and culture similarly depleted our vaginas?  How creative, vital, sexual do you feel?

We recently moved to a small house on the Raging River.  We downsized our home and let go of many belongings.  That’s just what they were – longings.  Longings for things that we didn’t really need.  What I really need is the juice and vibrancy that Tami talks about.  I want to keep creating in my world – through relationship, expression – all the ways of being truly alive.  This glorious summer I’ve been spending time in nature every day – dormant seeds are starting to grow.  I used to sit on my meditation cushion in the early morning hours.  Recently I’ve taken to doing walking mediation to see the sunrise above the Lake Alice Trail.  It’s how I go to church.

You know, this Valley is almost like one big giant fertile vagina – and I’m growing in it.  There I said it.  Wow!