Facebook Publication Date: 8/23/2021 8:08

The Six Tenets: Tenet 2 – Dig Deep – ALL NEW

I remember digging.

Easy digging.

On the beach, in a bathing suit with ruffles on the bottom, just after eating sandwiches and apples with a light dusting of sand; muddy feet and sunbonnets on a perfect San Diego beach day.

My sister and I, with plastic buckets and pails, making sandcastles and mud pies, while the grown ups watched under the umbrella, keeping watch over the cooler and Mom with bandaids and Mercurochrome for the inevitable boo-boos. Dad was on the pier, catching our dinner, which Mom would fry up later with cornbread and beans and salad with bright orange French dressing. Summer supper.

Easy digging. In soft sand and salt air. Sometimes we would get it in our heads to dig to the center of the earth, all the way down. We never got further than a foot, if that, I recall. But we were certain we would find treasure, and sometimes we did! Loose change, seashells, once a rusty watch. We would run back to Mom and she would go all wide eyed at what we found, and promise to make sure our treasures were safe.

Once, my plastic spade broke. I was inconsolable–for about two minutes. The distraction of cookies and chips and Kool-Aid in a plastic cup were enough to divert a tragedy. And then I dug with my hands! Even more fun! Digging up to my wrists, then elbows, dirty and burned and blissful. Plastic spade long forgotten.

Eventually we would head home, with blankets spread over the back seat of the Buick to soak up our dampness, if not the sand of half the beach, asleep before we hit the freeway, legs tangled together in the middle of the bench seat; lulled by Aretha and Marvin and Smokey and Dionne. We would awaken in the apartment to the smell of fish and cornbread. We would eat, still sandy (Mom didn’t run baths till later) and savor our time at the shore.

We didn’t go often, and now, as an adult, I can imagine why. All the prep work; getting picnic into the cooler; finding towels and blankets; herding two little girls who were far more excited than obedient; wrangling a husband who could spend, if you let him, hours in the bait store debating the merits of different worms–and then packing the whole thing up, and de-sanding the car, but not before cleaning and cooking the fish that stunk up the Buick for days.

But how fun it was! How amazing to be at the edge of the shore and come back with sloshy buckets of water, and make mud (too much mud) and not worry about being dirty, or if your braids came loose, or if your apple slices fell into the sand. Mom, usually clean to the point of compulsive, would just grimace as she wiped off the slices and gave them back to us. We survived.

We thrived.

_________

Digging is hard. So much harder when we become adults.

As grownups, with jobs and mortgages and sunscreen and creaky knees and protective gloves and shovels and spades, digging is no longer play.

Digging is work. Digging is a chore; it is something we have to do so as to get to something; to make way for flowers, or veggies, or fence posts, or to remove tumbleweeds and gopher holes.

Digging makes for sore backs and callused hands. Digging makes for dust in our faces, and sunburned necks. The fantasy of sandcastles and hoping for gold (or at least a rusty Timex) gives way to the reality of hardpacked, unforgiving soil. Tedious, we can often lose sight of the end game: the rows of kale; the elegant fenceline gracing the front field; the weeds gone; the gophers deterred; the tree which will grow to give shade and succor to generations.

That is, if we do our digging well. Some plantings will do ok with a shallow hole; some need more, much more. Sometimes soil needs to be prepped because it is so hard that no tool will break it. Sometimes it needs to be watered to become soft enough, pliable enough.

Digging always takes more time than one thinks it will take. When I go outside to dig, I double the time I think it will take to make one hole, two holes, three. And often, it’s still not enough. There is more to do; deeper and deeper to go. I am so sore. I want to abandon the project; the process.

But I hear a voice. A rough voice, not unkind, but definitely directive.

‘Put your back into it!’

It’s Daddy.

Daddy was an organic horticulturist before organic was cool. On his little plot he grew greens and tomatoes and turnips and carrots and beans and chiles which he would dry and then drop liberally into every pot on the stove–collards; black eyed peas; neck bones; chicken and rice. Even spaghetti. Even meat loaf.

He fed us, along with the fish he caught from the pier near North Island Naval Air Station where he worked as a jet mechanic; a sheet metal man who kept fighter jets aloft, and who would then come home to clean and dress fish, and then, still in his overalls, tend to his garden.

Only now, as I myself age, do I fully appreciate what Daddy did for us. On weekends, between football and basketball games, he would be out there tirelessly, always prepping, always planting.

Always digging.

If you grow organic, you have to be hands on. You can’t just plant and spray chemicals and hope for the best. No. You have to know good bugs from bad; you need to get your hands dirty; you need to hoe and weed and be ever vigilant.

As it is for Chief Watkins, so it is for us.

Digging deep is something not often considered in racial justice; or if it is considered, it is discarded. Too often, we decide that it is altogether too much work. It’s easier to shop the produce section at Kroger or Aldi or Costco; and if that’s too much, there’s always the frozen section. A quick thaw and nutrition is at hand. Or, if we want to feel virtuous, there is always the farmer’s market where we can get carrots with tops on and heirloom tomatoes and apples and pears, and learn about the farmers–I mean growers–but rarely about the workers who actually did the hoeing and the digging and the picking and the sorting.

We are once removed. Our hands remain soft and clean. Our overalls stay pristine.

This cannot be if we want to reap the harvest of the North Star.

As I pivot to our orchard bearing the fruit of racial justice, I think of the work–and it is indeed work–necessary and crucial and which simply cannot be outsourced.

Because we do try. To outsource.

Rather than park at Kroger, we park on our couches and read and read, and then forget what we consumed before the book even goes back to the shelf. Or, we do the analogue of the farmer’s market, appreciating/appropriating/Columbusing the work of others; all too often not the actual workers in the fields, stooping and picking and weeding, but those who take credit for the harvest, while their palms remain as soft as our own.

Again, gently and lovingly, No.

We need to sweat. We need to have dirt under chipped fingernails; we need to have muddy boots; we need to taste the soil as the wind whips it up into our noses and mouths. We need to keep it organic, which means we need to root and weed hands on; faces close enough to smell the loam. We need to dig, again and again and again; deep enough we go beneath the topsoil, so roots will take.

We do indeed need to work.

But this work does not have to be a slog. Does not have to be tedious. Does not have to be joyless.

Daddy always came back from his little plot with quiet joy on his face. Even when frustrated by aphids. Even when bone tired. The pride he took in feeding his family from the labor of his hands made the beans and tomatoes and yes, the neverending chiles, made the food even more nourishing.

So it must be with us. As we water, and dig, and amend, with the tools we are learning to use with competent precision, there is indeed joy and Hesed love. We share our implements; share our sunscreen, share our cups of orangeade.

And orange slices.

Our orchard will thrive, not because we farmed out the work that is ours alone to do, but because each of us knows the sweat and the effort and the faithfulness behind each tree. Each of us can admire soil streaked overalls and jeans; and smile at smudged noses. Each of us can smell the soil we have worked, side by side and shoulder to shoulder.

Spades will break. We will stumble over gopher holes. We will ache sometimes.

Count it all joy.

This is How We Do, so we can sit at a laden table and share the firstfruits of our labor with the people we stand with and for.

How soiled; how holy are your overalls?

Dig deep.

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