Garden! and More!

Spring has sprung its leak early and is spewing warm winds across the central plains of Montana. Also springing farmers out of their winter hibernation finding the familiar fever of "hurry up and wait" - keeping an eye to the sky, all seeding implements revving their engines, aimed at April, the greening start-line, the month who's trigger finger awakens nature to Montana's own resurrected Christ, transfigured in longer days, warmer winds, pertruding green foliage, and a big flipp'n blue sky.


I began to garden.
To the right reveals my efforts. Those fine piles were then spread left/westward readying a bed to tuck corn into.

A fine tomato crop.

This pic is from last summer and the hope of a,
now brown earth, to be covered once again in life.








(from left to right)
The infamous Bucko, Bucko's mother Classy, and Serenade gaze at me wondering why I must continually transport their poop to different locations in the yard.


So again today I began my search for meaning, for spring, for the gifts that make life - and I suppose I did...I shoveled poop.
Those reds and yellows, those horses come from that gift...a good recipe of decomposition...the resurrected pantheon-Christ of flowers, tomatoes, horses, and shoveling me!

Though I sweat, though my back hurt a bit - I thought about those in the past and those who are presently being kicked off their land, wondering what that kind of pain would be like, wondering how that is happening today, kicking around the ever present reality that our affluent society may slightly be an illusion, living off the backs of the "have nots" in "3rd world" countries...

"I want there to be democracy, no more inequality - I am looking for a life worth living, liberation, just like God says."
- José Pérez, 24 years old, Zapatista, captured at Oxchuc, January 4, 1994

"If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines - then my world changes. This is what is happening with the "option for the poor," for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence....
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. they are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order."
- Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History.

....