Course:Musqueam Garden
| CRWR 501P 003 |
|---|
 |
| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
|
| Important Course Pages |
| Categories |
The Musqueam Garden is a garden located on the UBC Farm that grows edible and medicinal plants with and for the elders of the Musqueam community. I have been volunteering there for a few months on Thursday mornings, when I help with the weekly harvest. It’s an extremely beautiful, meditative place; working there has been very meaningful for me and given me an important counterbalance to my writing practice.
I gardened a lot as a kid; we grew tomatoes, chard, strawberries (kind of) and a few other things in our yard. My dad was and is very passionate about native plants, cursing the invasive iceplant and thistles that disrupted the soil around our house. Development in Southern California has cleared a lot of land of native live oak trees, which live for centuries if left undisturbed. My dad would buy live oak tree saplings from the nursery and take me and my brother out on hikes to plant them, putting chicken wire around them so park officials would think the county did it. It worked; everyone watered the trees, some of which we could see from our backyard. They’re still there today, growing. I hope they’ll be there for a long time.
A cultivation practice isn’t about you. It’s the plants, or the poems, that are in charge. The hours I spend in the garden are often the most wordless of my week. I get to work with my body instead of my mind. The small, repetitive tasks I do become part of a tapestry of labor so enormous that, if it were laid out in front of me, I’d never be able to find my place within it. But the work I do still matters, because it sustains life beyond my own.