4th Monday Genre: Open Letter
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Dear Sekuru,

Recently, I overheard an old farmer talk about how he learned to grow things. He described, in simple but vivid detail, a scene from his youth. His mother would come through the kitchen where the tomato starts were growing and gently brush her hand through the flatted forests of tomato trees, each about three inches high. According to the old farmer, she was simulating the wind and by doing so she was helping to strengthen or harden the little plants to the elements they would eventually experience when transplanted to the garden. This simple act was a revelation to me. Here is a growing practice that is easy to do and easy to convey to someone else, and yet it is equally easy to lose in as little as one generation.

I’ve heard of heirloom furniture pieces, and I’m learning about heirloom seeds. These are things that we pass down from one generation to the next. But what about heirloom practices? And by practices, I don’t mean just with respect to cultivating plants. I also mean heirloom practices in the sense of cultivating relationships with others and our own development as well. In an age that seems to be getting increasingly faster and farther apart, where are we to find such practices today? How do we, how can we, incorporate them into our lives today?

For example, I know that I can go on Google and YouTube and find a hundred people, each from a different country, telling me how to plant seeds, or take care of animals, or fix a car. The knowledge is out there. But I can’t help feeling that this collective, digital repository of knowledge, of information, is somehow fundamentally different from the old farmer and his mother’s tomato plants. That knowledge represents some sort of embedded wisdom, some sort of heirloom memory. And yet it seems that the sharing of knowledge, wisdom, and memory has shifted from being vertical—one generation to another—to horizontal—within a single generation. Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not arguing for a return to old ways and old ideas, of people isolated from voices and perspectives different from their own. Instead, as I’m learning to grown things I feel like I’m constantly being reminded about the necessity of balance between experience and wisdom, between innovation and memory.

In an age where many relationships must exist in spite of extreme geographical separation, what are we to make of the current conditions in which we are forced to “grow ourselves”? When we are both sower and seed, from where are we to take direction? In what soil do we set our roots?

Y’rs,
Muzukurukomana
(Andy)

—25 April 2016—

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text © Andy Engel, 2016