Member-only story
The Miracle of the Micro-Farm
Anyone can farm at home. Doing so could save your life, and that of others.
When I was a young child, my father used to walk over from his apartment, three blocks away, for no reason other than to water my mother’s front lawn. They had been divorced for several years by then, but regardless, whenever he came to see me, one of the first things he’d do is walk outside and do what my mother never did: water the lawn.
My father was an intense man, doing everything with intention, and rarely sitting still. In fact, when he did sit down, more often than not, he’d fall asleep, within seconds. I still think that this was the price he paid for surviving off of four hours of sleep a night for decades, and burning more energy over each eighteen hour day than most of us expended over twice that long.
So here he was, watering a lawn that wasn’t his, wearing an expression on his face that I could only describe as ‘at peace’. It was as though his prefrontal cortex switched off, and the ‘lizard’ part of his brain — the part that remembered its origins as a part of the planetary ecosystem — took over. It is largely because of this memory that I started watering the lawn myself, as my father spent more and more time in New York, where he had ‘planted new roots’, and was cultivating those.
I noticed that I, too, felt different as I watered the lawn. I projected myself into the grass, plants and trees, imagining them quenching their thirst; paying attention to the wind, as it made its way across the blades, and leaves; feeling the temperature and the humidity in an unexpected way; listening to the crickets hidden in the grass, and the birds perched on the trees; and watching bees and butterflies make their way methodically, from bud to blossom, in what could only be called — collectively — a choreography.
In short, I Zenned the f*ck out.
It wouldn’t be for another thirty-five years that I’d have a patch of green at my disposal to tend to. That’s because after I left my childhood home, I spent the next three-and-a-half decades in high-rise apartment buildings in cities, where greenery was at its minimum, and where a balcony was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
