Seeding Uncertain Survival

By Anna Blaedel

This year, as part of my Holy Week observance, I built an asparagus bed.

A number of years ago, my dad – my gentle, patient, generous dad, who is now well over a decade into living with Parkinson’s – got it into his head that I should grow asparagus. And sometime early in the pandemic, I tried.

I did a little research, picked a spot, bought a couple of asparagus crowns, and put them in dirt.

Most of what I know about growing things goes something like this: gather seeds or seedlings or bulbs; place them in soil; ask them to help me know what they need to grow and thrive; do what I can, grateful for the sun and rain and soil, vital participants in the care; watch in awe and wonder as things grow; savor and share, gratefully, the harvest that becomes. Mystery. Magic. Miracle. No guarantees, but – so often – beauty, gift.

There is so much I am still learning about planting and pruning, creating conditions for life to bloom. I mean that literally, and also metaphorically. There is so much I am still learning about what I, and we, need to survive.

Like my dad, I was, I am, drawn to the plucky, perennial endurance of asparagus. An asparagus plant can continue to send up tender spring shoots for decades. I am grateful for the invitation into anticipation, and practice in patience; by starting with crowns rather than seeds I was shaving a year or two off the process, but even the most eager asparagus requires a few years of flourishing before harvesting.

Around the same time I first tried to grow asparagus, I was learning “crow pose,” or bakasana, in yoga – an arm balance where you lift your feet off the ground, supported by your hands, and the tops of your arms. Learning this pose involved a lot of toppling over, trying over and over, with more errors than not, until, mysteriously, magically, miraculously, it stuck. Inspired, too, by a child crow figure in the Spacious Tarot deck, I’ve started using the phrase “baby crow” as shorthand for meeting life’s uncertainty. Curiosity. Experimentation. Persistence. Play. Adaptation. Practice.

Spoiler alert: My first asparagus crowns did not survive. They did not root or rise or flourish, and I did not know why. But as I’ve asked others for wisdom and insight, I’ve gathered clues. The need for deeper and better drained soil, wider trenches, more sun, more crowns, so their roots can reach and connect underground.

As fear and uncertainty escalate, as facism and tyranny and gleeful disregard for everything precious swirl, so intensely, I am grateful for each and every chance to root in and remember life’s possibilities. Life is precarious, and, too, life is persistent.

“The most powerful journeys we must take are the ones we are not ready for and cannot prepare for,” Báyò Akómoláfé writes. “These journeys do not take us to predetermined destinations…But we must take them because we too are taken by Something Beyond Naming.”

It doesn’t actually matter whether or not I ever grow asparagus. It does matter, so very much, that I, that we, continue planting and tending, dreaming and growing, baby crow-ing our way toward “Something Beyond Naming.”

Moshen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student recently arrested and detained by ICE, writes, “I want people to know that the work and activism we have done was centered in the energy of love. We did it because of our love for humanity, our love for justice, our love for human rights…”

It can take 20 years for an olive tree to begin growing back, and so many more years before olives bud and bloom. As US-made bombs continue to rain down terror and death – genocide – on the people of Palestine, as settlers illegally occupy and seize Palestinian land, fathers and daughters, parents and children and grandchildren – those who by some miracle manage to survive – continue planting olive trees, some of which, by some miracle, manage to survive.

Akómoláfé also teaches us “there are always other questions.” adrienne maree brown suggests we compost the question “Do we all share the same worldview?” and instead ask, “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”

As my dad declines – oh, the sacred beauty, unutterable tenderness, and sharp grief, underwriting that phrase of mortal honesty – asparagus has become entangled in my mourning. What if I don’t get to feed my dad asparagus?

Mahmoud Khalil missed the birth of his child, because he was illegally detained, imprisoned in Jena, Louisiana. “I believe in the innate equality of all human beings,” he testified. “I believe in human dignity. I believe in the right of my people to look at the blue sky and not fear an impending missile.”

Audre Lorde wrote, “We were never meant to survive.” Alexis Pauline Gumb’s new biography of Lorde is titled Survival is a Promise. Lorde wrote, “I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection.” Gumb’s describes Lorde as “identifying less as an individual than as a possibility.”

David Evans, whose wisdom you can glimpse in a recent interview with enfleshed includes these words by James Baldwin in his email signature: “The terms of this revolution are precisely these: that we will learn to live together here or all of us will abruptly stop living.” I am only unconvinced about the “abruptly” – death can come both abruptly and slowly, the cumulative effect of slow degradation, suddenly, urgently, catastrophic. Khalil continues, “I write this letter as the sun rises, hoping that the suspension of my rights will raise alarm bells that yours are already in jeopardy. I hope it will inspire your outrage that the most basic human instinct, to protest shameless massacre, is being repressed by obscure laws, racist propaganda and a state terrified of an awakened public.”

I do not know how, or if, we will survive the cascading crises constituting our collective life. So many have not survived, will not survive, are only now, barely, barely surviving. Everything precious, everything sacred, in jeopardy, under threat.

It is said, by people who study authoritarian governments, that it takes only 3.5 percent of a society demonstrating ongoing, persistent opposition to a regime before it starts to crack. “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”

So, a few weeks ago, I built an asparagus bed. A few days later, I planted crowns in well composted soil. I added two basil plants, a dill seedling, and some nasturtium seeds gifted to me, because I’ve learned they like to encourage asparagus to grow. I do not know if the crowns will root, or grow. But what I do know, for certain, is that each year that comes and goes without my planting any asparagus, my grief grows and the possibility of feeding my dad asparagus from my garden declines. I do not know if I will feed my dad asparagus. But I want to practice into the possibility. I want to follow my beating heart, move with those figuring out how we can, yet, live.

We are not individuals. We are possibilities. We are seeds and gardens, we are soil and harvest. We are vital participants in the care that makes life possible. Seeding a future. Rooting and rising – in solidarity, in defiance, in love – toward “Something Beyond Naming.” Resurrecting. Baby crow-ing toward shared survival.