Winds of Change

#MesoamericanDanza presentation at Treehugger Organic Farms

Today we said our farewell to a piece of land that has sustained us and our community here in South Broward County for the past 4 years... a permaculture oasis in the midst of the concrete jungle we know as South Florida, east of the Everglades... a local food sanctuary known as Treehugger Organic Farms, now listed as permanently closed on your google GPS mapping system.

It was a bittersweet walk through the daikon radishes, lesser known banana species, greens, fruit trees, birds and butterflies. This farm felt like home, that safe place you can go to for peace, quiet, and tenderly cared for oceans of green.

@bawshkeengwabigun @treehuggercommunity #togetherwegrow

A post shared by Scott Evan Schlossman (@iloveushutup) on Apr 30, 2017 at 2:34pm PDT

There was a food forest on a mulch hill, a coconut grove interspersed with comfrey plants, florida nopalitos, tumeric and ginger, a spring fed pond that supplies water to the farm, and rotating fields of boniato, tomato, kale, collards, mustard, fennel, spinach, beans, millet, sugar cane, and just about everything in between.

Winds of change... @TreehuggerFarms -> #TogetherWeGrow https://t.co/uRJ5XiRj2L

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— Tara Chadwick (@wabigun) May 1, 2017

One day after the mega #PeoplesClimateMarch in several cities, and on the eve of #InternationalWorkersDay, it seemed like a huge mountain to move.  The reality of agricultural land tenure here in Florida is that access to farmable land is unstable, market based, and temporary.   In reflecting, I realize that personally, I subscribe more to the Haudenosaunee approach to land management whereby we humans are responsible to protect, nurture and strengthen the land/ soil/ earth, on behalf of it's only true owners, that generation of unborn children who has not yet arrived here via the miracle we know as birth.

Miami Herald photo by Al Diaz

What a timely consideration given the fact that I am, for the first time in my life, the biological auntie to one of these not-yet-born owners of the earth.  But in the volatile market economy that most of us are engaged within by choice or necessity, land is but a commodity, like humans once were, to be bought, sold and traded at the will of those who believe themselves to be in positions of power over others.

But this momentary twinge of grief in losing a space in which to enjoy the company of others, and ourselves in the company of Mother Earth and her pretties, is just a reminder that in fact we are owners of nothing, but rather bearers of ideas, thoughts, insights, and the potential to seed a new generation of humans with the capacity to return to a life steeped in nature, health and harmony with the cycles of all living beings including the soil, rock, sand and oil that make up the material we know as earth.