While Harvesting Green Beans by Teresa Taylor

Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

~Linda Hogan

Greetings to our friends and community,

As I go about early autumn garden pottering, I am present to the past. I wonder at the history of these vegetables and herbs I am privileged to harvest. I imagine ancestors, generation after generation, sorting out what was safe to eat, what was delicious to eat, what was nutritious to eat and healing to eat, remembering where to find it again, learning how to cultivate and how to preserve and store the essential bounty of the earth.

How amazing that the green bean in my hand has its own miraculous story interwoven with those who came before me. And then mid-green bean pick, it lands in me that my recently dead beloved momma is now an ancestor. Until this moment I had thought of her with the ancestors, but not of the ancestors. Green bean in hand the lineage of my mother: my mother’s mother, my mother’s mother’s mother and endlessly on gather before me in the simple and ancient act of the fall harvest and the lines of time and space blur. They whisper welcome. I whisper thank you.

What does grief ask of me? What does love ask of me? What do the ancestors ask of me? In a way, I have been on the take. I can see that I have paid lip service to life. I can see that I have paid lip service to the ancestors. In the act of picking that green bean, I acknowledged my indebtedness. Ley lines of love shoot from my outstretched arms from the precious present to the precious past and the precious future connecting all.

In celebration of the cycle of life and death, the forgotten dead, the remembered dead and the unborn...

Samhain Blessings,

Teresa, spirit of Thule, Tucker, Huxley and all at Paradise Found

Not success. Not growth. Not happiness.The cradle of your love of life … is death.

~Stephen Jenkinson

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