Me and the interns usually start our mornings in the Garden harvesting. It has been so cool to be able to see all the changes in the garden. These are most of the main vegetables we harvest every morning! I really enjoy digging for potatoes, it feels like I’m digging for gold. I’m amazed by how many beans the rows are able to make. Almost every day we collect a huge bowl full of them! I find myself becoming more present when I harvest. I can’t help but be amazed by its calming beauty, and fresh herbal scents. The Garden truly feels like a magical place.

On this day we made blackberry mint mojitos for the movie Spirited Away! We took this picture under the tree house in the Garden. The blackberries gave the mojito a fresh fruity flavor and the mint was a cool addition.

Me and the interns like to climb trees. This tree we found in the native food forest. We were amazed at how strong and bendy it was!

During the garden tour I looked down to see to a small bee had landed on my jacket. I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by this tiny creature, as it used its appendages to gently wipe off the pollen encasing its furry body. The garden tour continued, and I carefully walked to the next row Anita was showing me and the other interns. I was cautious not to make abrupt movements with my arm. To my surprise the small animal did not fly away, but instead seemed to burrow in the crease of my jacket, almost as if it were content. I remember being in awe of its glossy see-through wings, and vibrant yellow and brown fur. The calm nature of this animal made me question the violent depiction society seems to paint of its species. I tried enticing the bee to crawl on a nearby Dahlia, but it had no interest in the flower. Its behavior being similar to reluctance from my observation. The small creature stayed with me a few moments longer, and I found my attention shifting back to the tour. I remember glancing down at my sleeve to find the bee was no longer there. The only trace of it was the small pollen trail left behind. The small interaction between this animal and I gave me more insight on the sentience that exists within everything living. ​

This feeling of being in the midst of change is still present: in myself, in Songaia, and in the world. I’m going to bring in some chemistry again and use an energy diagram to illustrate how I visualize the energy required to achieve a change. For every chemical reaction, energy is needed to move from the initial reactant compounds to the final products. Even if the products are lower in energy—at a more stable, comfortable state—reaching that state requires energy to do things like break chemical bonds.

As we move through transition, energy is also required of us. Energy to leave the things that we are used to, to accept newness, to live with uncertainty, to question habits and patterns and to envision and build and embody a new state of being. There may not be a lot of hope right now that the new ways of living that are to come are going to be easier than what we’ve known, but maybe we underestimate how challenging and demanding life has become. It’s during this transition phase that we have the opportunity to discover how much better things can be.

I envision Songaia kind of at the peak of the transition state, between the individualism of the mainstream way of living and the full potential of established community living. This full potential may not be possible in our current economy, maybe not even until we change the broader culture of judgment and blame and competition that is so at odds with our striving towards togetherness. But the fact that this community has thrived so well in the midst of “currently existing capitalism” is to me a great source of hope for what is possible.

Some wisdom I picked up from the Rite of Passage Journeys receiving ceremony a couple weeks ago has stuck with me. For the youths who were returning home, the transition to adulthood was happening whether they and their families recognized and embraced it or not. So a main purpose of the program is to bring intention to the transition, without which families often end up on autopilot, subconsciously resisting the changes that they consciously know have to happen.

Sometimes I am dismayed at how our inclination to resist change and conserve energy can work against us. I am beginning to appreciate how important mindfulness and intention can be, as if they are a catalyst in a chemical reaction, decreasing the height of the energy barrier during our transitions.

But the difficulty of accepting change can still sneak up on us. To transition from one trajectory to another, to allow ourselves to be influenced in our thinking and then to examine and adjust and our actions can be a humbling experience. The energy needed to cross over the transition state and follow through with the change can be surprisingly high…

Blackberry season is in full swing, and for the whole two months I’ve been here, Songaia has been blessed with berries. I’ve spent some quality time harvesting raspberries, golden raspberries, native blackberries, salmonberries, currants, white currants, jostaberries, and blueberries. Most of the time I’m pretty good at going for the ripest berries, but sometimes I’ll find a berry that I think is ripe and I’ll try to pick it, only to find that it doesn’t want to come off the bush yet. Depending on how hard I’ve worked to reach this berry and how sure I am that it’s the right color and squishiness, my response may vary. Sometimes I find it surprisingly difficult to accept the information that the berry is giving me: “I’m not ready yet!” Sometimes I want to believe that I know better than the berry, and engage in a tug-of-war. On the occasions that I win, I am usually disappointed by a sour, unripe berry.

I’ve had this experience many times. And the practice of transitioning from a sense of certainty about picking a particular berry to accepting that I was wrong and leaving it for another day can still be surprisingly hard, even when I approach most berries with more of a question of ripeness and a willingness to listen to the berry.

Maybe it’s a silly example, though, especially when so many of the changes we are facing come with real grief. Our planet is getting hotter and smokier and more uncertain, and even though this doesn’t mean there won’t be unexpected beauty and healing yet to come, we are losing the climate that we’ve known.

For a while, actually, I was craving change. But I may have slightly underestimated the challenges associated with the changes I’ve brought into my life. There is very little that is familiar to me now, here, in this new place; and even if what is familiar didn’t serve me well, I’m feeling the need for a deeper level of processing. Not only have my living situation, daytime activities, hobbies, and future career plans all shifted radically in the last several months, but as of only four years ago I changed my gender as well. For those of you with whom I haven’t shared this already, I am a transgender male, and I spent my first 25 years living as female. Between the hormone therapy, overcoming depression, and beginning treatment for ADHD, my life is pretty unrecognizable from the way it’s been for most of the last 15 years.

These are probably things that I should be sharing with a therapist and not in a blog post. But suffice it to say, I’ve experienced a thing or two about living in transition. It’s exciting, scary, unexpectedly exhausting, and unexpectedly wonderful. Personally, I am certain that the new life I’m stepping in to will be much more energetically favorable than my old way of living—and much better aligned with my purpose and gifts. And hopefully, with a little recognition of both the hard work we’re faced with and our capacity for resilience, we can mourn and dream and create and move into the next phase of life with the assurance that even though a lot of it may be new, we just might be okay.

Brian recites "Be Cool, Little Seed" at the July Strawberry Social.

Be Cool, Little Seed
by "Mulch Carruthers" 
​
As an intern, half of my days are spent in the Songaia garden, which really is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It is a hectic, chaotic garden, a riot of flowers and vegetables, both eaten, growing into one another’s territories and getting all quantum entangled. Most things in it I can’t identify and never will. I think this might be a dahlia, but I’m not for sure. This might be a carrot, but who’s to say? Not me, certainly. There are vivid, royal purples and vaguely pervy pinks where you wouldn’t think they’d be. A sudden shock of needless blue speckled in yellow. The omnipresent, weightless mass of green. The garden is a mixture of practicality and whimsy, not big enough or efficient enough for self-sustaining agriculture, but sprawling enough to be gorgeous and strange, to sit there and be weird, to be obsessed over and loved.

Some residents argue that they should only plant utilitarian, high yield foods, the better to survive when whatever inevitable Ragnarok is coming finally gets here, but to most of the Songaians that’s not the point. The philosophy behind the garden is, ‘You have to feed the soul as well as the body.’

I spend my mornings in the garden, weeding, mulching, picking fruit, berries, hauling horseshit, and in the afternoons I’m sent to make things in the barn or tearing down old structures or trying to process the food we picked in the garden that morning. I make dried figs and blackberry pie and blueberry fruit leather and zucchini chips. I’m going full on Little House on the Prairie here, I’m considering wearing a sunbonnet and dying of typhoid.


On my first day working in the garden, I meet Helum*, an older woman who pretty much lives for the garden, it’s human avatar, and I come to really respect her depth and breadth of knowledge.


She tries to show me how to weed the kale beds, a really important job as the people here go nuts about kale, parsing it like Chateau Lafitte, enumerating it’s qualities. The Curly Kale has overtones of pepper, and do I detect faint hints of cardamom? The Siberian Kale has a delicate, rosy-fingered sweetness to it, don’t you think? I can see pairing this with with a crisp apple salad, and a cider dressing would really make it pop. To me it’s all just kale, just barely this side of food, but I enjoy hearing them dissect the finer points of kale fetishism, although it makes as much sense to me as having a favorite brand of iceberg lettuce.


Helum tries to show me how to weed the kale, but it gets real complicated real fast. We kneel in the dirt and she identifies every single green thing. “So we want to weed around these little darlings, but, keep in mind, really nothing is truly a weed, they just lifeforms growing where we don’t necessarily want them to grow. These little ones are called Lambs Ears’, these fuzzy things, and how can you dislike something called a Lamb’s Ear? Let’s just leave her alone. And this fellow right here is Horsetail, which, yes, is technically a weed, but he has a lot of sentimental value for me, so let's just skip him for now. And this is Bindweed which causes terrible problems and is a devil to get rid of, but it’s a living thing and has just as much right to its life as us, so let’s not cut it back too much. It dreams, you know. It has hopes and feelings. This is buttercup, a weed, true, but such a lovely blossom! Would anyone really want to be responsible for ending its life journey?”

“Um,” I stammer. “So what should I actually do?”


Helum stares up at the sky, directly at, as far as I can tell, the sun.

After giving it a think, she says, “I don’t know.”


In another life this dithering would have driven me up the wall, so cloying, but when Helum does it I find it infinitesimally charming.


I come to really enjoy the gardening process, although I have no patience for it. I lack the Zen that comes with waiting gracefully. I fidget, I spaz out easily, I lose interest in anything that takes more than a few days to complete, I wander off, and gardening takes forever. We grow tomatoes, tend them, weed them, protect them from rats, squeeze them every couple of days just for the tactile joy of it, say encouraging things to them, and then, on their own langorous schedule, watch them turn lipstick shade colors, pick them, wash them, chop them, a quick puree, boil them down, can them in steaming jars, all this toil and wait to make something that’s worth $2.49 in the supermarket, practically free in the global economies of scale.


It’s so crazily labor intensive and slow making food in this medieval way, you spend hours working and get a can and a half of peas, or three days to get a couple of jars worth of dehydrated cherries, an eternity for a bland bean salad. By the end you want to howl, ‘Save me, Monsanto! Inject me full of GMOs and gluten and corn syrup!”


I learn that it’s no use planting a crop unless you can tend to it, no use tending to it unless you can harvest it on time, no use harvesting it unless you can preserve it or gobble it all down immediately, and there’s little chance of you eating it unless it tastes good. It doesn’t have to taste superlative, but it at least has to be medium good, because if it doesn’t, you’ll pretty soon fall to the temptation of giving up this life of toil, getting out of the sun, scraping the dirt out from under your fingernails, acquiring a straight job, investing in oil and arms manufacturers and ordering the cheese fries.


But that’s where I and the Songaians differ. Tastes are just a bit altered here, and things are a big hit if they taste a little like soil and dirt. They eat salads without dressing. They eat nut-free collard pesto with nutri-yeast. They eat cold kale soup, and even if I had to conjure something unappetizing up, as a joke, I could not have fathomed this. At first I wondered if I was just being a sensitive little nelly on this point, wondering if these foods are actually bad or just foreign to my palette. I still haven't made up my mind. Sometimes it seems like there's an element trying to prove something with this food. It’s like saying, ‘Look how much old-timey effort and resources we can put into making something that only a Wiccan pixie would dare to eat.” I wonder, can any revolution succeed by eating Cream of Nettle soup? And if it can, would I want to be want to be on the winning side?

But still, the process of gardening is intriguing.

“Gardening is all about sex,” Helum tells me. She’s showing me how to cross-pollinate the zucchini. It involves taking the yellow squashblossom flowers, the male and female, and mooshing them together, sexing them up. You squish the stamen or pistil or whatever it is of the happy yellow penile head into the vaginas of the female flowers. It’s erotic from an inhuman, removed, God’s eye point of view.

She says, “And then we’re going to take a piece of masking tape and tape the female flowers shut in a little chastity belt.”

Afterwards there’s happy, spermy Crayola-yellow pollen on our fingers and we dispose of the used, floral penises, spent and limp.


“Squash are very promiscuous,” Helum explains. “If we didn’t tape them shut they might breed with other strains of squash that we don’t want in this bed, it just ensures that these little darlings keep their maidenly virtue. What hussies, what trollops, these squash are, if given their way. They are proud to announce their place in the oneness of things. ‘Look at my genitals,’ they scream with every bright, garish color, every labial fold.”


I’m 16% aroused.


A week later, a scandal erupts at Songaia as someone has been entering the garden and night and taking all the squashblossoms, especially the male ones for some reason. This means that the females aren’t getting fertilized, leading to little, stunted, erectile dysfunction squash. It’s such a weird crime, and the Songaians are genuinely disturbed by it.


“We can’t let this happen, people! Our squash are suffering!”


Squashblossoms are edible, so maybe somebody is taking them to garnish their salads. Lists of suspects are drawn up, armchair psychology is used to try to identify the kind of nefarious character who would take all the zucchini wangs in the dead of night, this symbolic castration of the community. They have me make a dozen signs to be planted around the squash bed, saying, “PLEASE DO NOT PICK THE SQUASHBLOSSOMS!!!” in an increasingly desperate and pleading font. They go full tilt Agatha Christie. “So, I saw you going into the West Gate of the garden last night, around 7:38. You know, where the squash beds are. Anything you’d care to share? Hmmmm?”


Even I come under suspicion, which shows how little they know of me. I’m the last person here who’s going to willingly stuff flowers into my mouth and gobble them, except if I thought it was funny, which of course I do. I even begin to suspect myself. Maybe I’m doing it somnambulistically.
We’re through the looking glass, here.


Helum is showing me how to plant a new crop of kale, which is much more my speed than weeding the kale. She demonstrates how to poke a little hole in the soft, wet ground with my finger and drop in a couple of microscopic black dot seeds.She says, “They only need to be covered with a thin layer of soil, just like a blanket for these little babies. Such tiny seeds! So much potential! And when you plant them, you tell them, ‘Hello, little seed. It’s time to wake up. We promise to make this as welcoming a home as we can for you and we thank you for coming generation after generation and sharing your lifecycle with us. You are welcome and accepted here, you are loved and wanted. Please bless us with your presence. And...breathe.”


And then she folds her hands and closes her eyes for a moment.


“You want me to say that every time I plant one of these?” I look into my cupped hand, there must be five hundred seeds occupying less than half a cubic inch of space, and I am self-centered and small and weak and stupid, and I don’t know if I’m capable of actually saying those words in that order.


“Well, that or something like it,” she says. “Whatever comes to mind. Just give them a blessing, welcome them to our garden.”


“Okay, then.”


And Helum goes away and does whatever, leaving me on my knees in the deep, brown earth. And I try, I swear to God I try, to say the words each time I plant a kale seed because I’m trying to be a good person and not the monster that I secretly suspect I am. I try, but it’s hard, because I am not a sincere person, I just lack that capacity, I was born without that particular eyetooth. But I repeat Helum’s mantra, as well as I can remember it, which is not very well. I close my eyes when I say it, and have to consciously force my eyes not to perform a scoffing, teenagery roll beneath the eyelids, because maybe if I pretend to be a good person for long enough I’ll wake up one day and transubstantiate into an actual good person.


By the fifth seed, however, I’ve edited the prayer down to, “Little seed, little seed, just be cool.”


And this I am capable of saying with every one of those six hundred seeds, which will eventually grow a crop that I am incapable of aesthetically appreciating, because it’s kale, but I say it anyway, eyes closed like a ding-a-ling. And I’ll end up saying every day at my time in Songaia, maybe thirty times a day, silently, inwardly, when something bothers me, when I just don’t fundamentally understand the good gentlefolk who live here, whenever Cream of Nettle soup touches my tongue, when my personal furies arrive, which is all the time. I say, “Little seed, little seed, just be cool.”


I am the little seed in this clumsy metaphor, just to spell it out. It lacks the poetry of Helum’s blessing, but it still kind of works.


Let’s all say it together, shall we?


Little seed, little seed, just be cool.


And...breathe.


*Names in this story have been changed. For purely comedic effect.