I’m thinking about the difference John O’Donohue describes in Eternal Echoes between tools and technology. Technology, he says, does not extend human presence but rather turns it into function. Our technology shapes who we are and how we interact with our world. Conversely, tools like a shovel, a rake, a pen, we actively participate in the world when we use them. When we push a button to start a machine and then simply run the machine, we become more involved with the function of that machine and less so the activity we are doing. Distance is created such that no longer are we inside the activity, but are mere observers while something undead manipulates the living earth.
Even my little green electric tiller is a good contrast to shoveling, laboriously, inch by inch, my garden. When I till, I passively follow along as the tiller grinds its way through the plow-zone of my garden. All I feel is the vibration of the machine and occasional jarring when it bites into rock. Ghost vibrations rattle my muscles for hours after. When I shovel and loosen soil with a pickax, pulling and piling weeds as I go, I build the experience into my body as memory. It is not only the ground I loosen, but thoughts and ideas that rise and go as I work are integrated into the soil itself.
I planted garlic late this fall. The company I order it from in Asheville had to pick themselves up from the dregs of Hurricane Helene. I, too, reeled for weeks at the damage done to so many communities, and when they emailed offering to cancel and refund garlic orders in case that was the last thing you needed to think about it, I kept mine: I needed the normalcy of it. I needed to plant something after all those trees were uprooted. I’ve been planting garlic for a few years now; it has become my autumn ritual. When the sacks of garlic seeds arrived, I dug trenches with a shovel, filled the trenches with compost from my chickens’ manure and bedding, kitchen scraps, and weeds, and layered in top soil to give the garlic something to root into come spring.
Again I knew the texture of soil as I sifted through clay and stone, as I mixed rich manure with soil hardened by drought and washed out by heavy rain. My knees were cold pressed into that soil, bare skin on bare skin. As I knelt there, I thought of the poem by Indigenous poet John Trudell “Diablo Canyon” where he says,
“They told me squat over there
By the trash
They left a soldier to guard me
I was the Vietcong
I was Crazy Horse
Little did they understand
Squatting down in the earth
They placed me with my power”
(quoted from When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through)
How do we find the within when we are so focused on external experience, addicted to things? We need the things to create experience for us, thus we keep ourselves from ever touching, let alone dwelling in, that infinite space inside us. It’s an addiction, O’Donoue calls it. “And you won’t find our roots online” says Indigenous poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio in “Kumulipo.”
The day after I planted garlic I wrote:
Some poetry today is like swallowing glass, its jagged edges brutalize my throat as I try to integrate it into myself. Not like this day, this Sunday gray of sky and soft of human striving. Three birds speak first: a cardinal, someone that sounds like a seagull yet so far from the sea, and a bird with a rapid trill. Rain fell on the garlic I planted and still lingers, the first rain a month after the storm.
Let me I take the bad with the good, for extremes of either one lead to the same ruin.