Haiku Reflection
This project was a good time to think about how sustainability relates to me and how I can relate it to other people. How can I take this idea of sustainability and process it and learn what it means to me, what it really means to me, and how can I further take that and own it enough to be able to express it to other people? I thought about several different things before I thought to write a series of haikus. I could have written a story, and thought about doing so, but it didn't set the tone I was looking for well enough. It wasn't repetitive in a meditative way, like the planting in the writing is, was and will be. It wasn't me, it wasn't real. I thought about writing a song but I felt restricted and pressured by the format and need for melody. A series of haikus could tell a story but still get the feeling across of the meditative mood, so I went with that.
The three competencies I tried to cover were self-authorship (especially self-reflection) aesthetics and ecosystems. I picked these three because they speak to me the most in the way that I relate to. Sustainability to me is embodied in organic agriculture and vice versa, so it made sense for me to pick this topic and these competencies.
The whole poem is self-reflection, but the third stanza lays it out there. It is really what I think about when I am planting transplants. This whole poem has happened to me on more than one occasion. Who am I? What am I? And the toughest question, why am I? A very wise man once brought these questions up to me while I was working at the SOF and I never forgot it. It helped me decide that it was really what I wanted to do. After that I did a lot of thinking and I found out that everything is made out of atoms and molecules and stardust and that these elements mix together and cycle and are always there, just shifting and changing shape and being a part of a system that is a complex web of interacting parts. But as people we do things to the earth that can change that. We do things like raise CO2 and O3 concentrations to levels that the earth wasn't designed to handle and we upset the balance. We compromise the ability of life to continue to exist the way it does. As a part of the ecosystem it is absolutely disgraceful and shaming that we are eliminating other parts of the web of life through our hubris. If we continue on the path we are on, we will lose genetic diversity that could be the cure for disease or varieties of plants with resistances to disease.
Another thing that has to do with ecosystems is the exchange of energy between biotic and abiotic entities. The plants, the seed, I cannot grow without light-energy from the sun and the air and the water. Plants also need other life to grow. Plants in natural systems need nitrogen fixed by rhizobacteria. Plant roots exude sugars which attract microbial life, which in turn attracts higher trophic level microbial life, the “waste” products of which are the food of plants. This cycle is present in the soil near plant roots, and it is repeated on many levels, which is represented by my grandchildren eating the bread from grain from the soil. My body stopped carrying my soul and returned to the earth, was taken up by the soil and taken up in turn again by the plants and then by my grandchildren.
Aesthetics come into play with the first part of the poem, the discussion of the divine, meditative task of planting, or of weeding, or of watering or any number of tasks on a market garden. This isn't a conventional definition of aesthetics because it isn't a single thing that can be observed and called beautiful. It isn't a pretty song. It is work, but it is incredibly profound and spiritual and uplifting. It is my church. If God isn't present at a fall garlic planting party, I'm not sure where He can be found. I'm not worried about it, though. He is the garlic, and He is me.
~ Michael Formisano
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