Eat Local - Live Local

Today is our neighborhood community workday.  Every spring and every fall our cluster of 28 homes gathers to spend a morning taking care of the community areas,  pulling weeds, planting annuals,  painting, and reconnecting with each other.   Granted if you miss this day the fine is steep, but for most of us we fulfill this obligation because we want to.    

This morning like so many mornings I realize how many of my neighbors I have not met.  As we shovel and spade and the annuals get their roots settled in, I think about how we as neighbors are settling our roots in.  My next door neighbor is running the Rock-n-Roll half marathon, as is another neighbor.  How did I not know this?  We are all laughing and I immediately start planning a neighborhood dinner.  

I had wanted to run the Rock-n-Roll half but had plans to be out of town at a wedding.  A wedding fraught with a lot of drama.  And thinking of that made me question:  why are we drawn like moths to flames to drama?  Why do we spend so much time and energy in travel, and exotic adventure?  Why do we need to be told to eat local food?  Why in comparison do we not know our neighbors, or local farmers, or the seniors at the local old-folks home?  

Like out of climate flowers growing in chemical soil, we buy foreign food for its cost and convenience, and fly about the country or the world on business and ignore the tending of our own gardens, our own health, and our own communities.   In my neighborhood, people get angry to have to spend a morning together and bicker about the fine that makes them do it.  But this morning, I cherished time with my neighbors.    And when I offered to host a dinner before the race, my neighbors were thrilled.   

Nutrition is tending to our health.  Gardening is tending to our soil.  I have spent a lifetime trying to be somewhere else.  In this season of new growth, I am pulled to my own corner of this world - where I have been all along.  This time, I want to put down roots.