Front paged at My Left Wing
Good morning, and may you have the strength to get up and do what needs to be done! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging — 2nd Anniversary Edition!
Oh, we've had some lovely days in the past week — highs in the 50's, although a bit windy yesterday. The snow has finally melted off the veggie patch, although there are remaining drifts in the back yard. A few inches of snow are predicted this morning. Bleh — I really want to get out into the yard and do some clean up because... because...
Yes! The first crocus have bloomed. I saw the first one open last Saturday afternoon, and by mid-week, they were scattered all over the front yard. These pink ones are being joined by the yellow and purple ones, and I see buds on the miniature daffodils. Whoo hoo! Gardening time! The feeling that prompted me to put up that first garden blogging diary two years ago. In honor of this milestone, I have a request: Lurkers Unlurk! We really want to know you.
The question has come up from time to time — even within the confines of garden blogging — of "why is this appropriate for a political blog." Or, more rudely "this is just a waste of space and is kicking other more important diaries [to be read, I suppose, as the complainant's diary] off the recent diaries list". And, rudest of all "why is this piece of shit clogging up the rec list. It doesn't belong there. Don't you know that there are [soldiers dying in Iraq] [children starving] [madmen in the Whitehouse] [pick a calamity]".
Well, my definition of "political" is much wider than specific issues, disasters or calamities, or who is running for which office or the horse-race coverage of which party is leading in the polls.
In my mind, politics encompasses everything. Politics is society, how we live, what we do, how we think. Politics is all about community, and without personal connections, there is no community.
In garden blogging, we've talked about pesticide use; water as a resource; urban renewal and the displacement of low-income housing; green building; conservation; environmentalism of various sorts; genetically modified food supplies; invasive plants; climate change; zoning laws — pick a "political" topic, and in some form or another it has probably intersected with discussions we've had in garden blogging.
And somehow, for two years, we've managed to share our differing viewpoints without a single flame war — a pretty goddamned impressive record. I believe we can cover this broad array of topics, while still respecting one another, because politics is also about finding common ground, and what is more common than the ground we live on?
By sharing the commonality of caring for our gardens, I've gotten along with the neighbors who have come and gone since we bought Casa de Frankenoid back in December 1992 — including a fundamentalist Christian family with home schooled children, and Republican yuppy lawyers.
Several years ago, as I was first getting into vegetable gardening, I met a man online at a Yahoo message board. Turned out he lived just up the freeway, and we arranged to meet — where else but at Paulino Gardens, one of Denver's premier nurseries? As I got to know the GreenMan and his lovely wife, we discovered that politically we shared different labels — he's staunch Republican, and I am so far left I'm about to fall over (if you're interested, I'm -9.00, -7.94 on the political compass). But because we had met outside the traditional confines of "political" discussions, we've found that we share more than just dirty fingernails, and have had some lively exchanges on topics of the day (in the last gubernatorial election, we commiserated that neither of us had a candidate we felt we could vote for). Now, I'll probably never convince the GreenMan that marijuana should be legalized, and he'll never convince me that Reagan was a great president. But, through the commonality of the common ground of our gardens, we have become friends, can respectfully disagree, and also discover the places where our purely "political" views do overlap.
So yeah, garden blogging — and the other community diaries — do belong on a "political" site. Didn't you learn from the feminists? The personal is political.
[That last shot is a preview of a picture I'll eventually take. It's the bell tower of a church near where I work. I need to get a zoom lens before I can really take it, and wait for the right angle of the sun to come around again — probably in November — to be able to get the play of morning light on that tight, spiral stair. Alas, I don't have the lens, and the sun has moved too high in the sky with the coming of spring. But I'm a gardner; I'm patient and can wait.]