My Neighbor Gave Me Twenty-Five Tomato Plants
providence, poetry, and personhood: a meditation
Welcome Back to The Wildroot Parables
Thank you for joining us!
I know, my goodness, it’s been far too long! I have been deep in the weeds (literally!) of spending time in the garden, as well as publishing my debut fiction novella, Ivy & Ixos, which took up a lot of my energy this month.
That said, I’ve had a lot of thoughts swirling in my mind lately, and I finally found “a way in” with the following meditation. I’m glad to bring it to you, today.
I hope these words find you well!
Blessings to all.
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And now, on to the meditation…
A Very Specific Providence
Every year, there are tomatoes.
We love tomatoes. We especially love to can our own twinkling jars of crimson crushed tomatoes ready on the shelf to add to sauces and soups and stews and chili. But growing our own tomatoes has often been tricky, here. The aging garden that we inherited is a bit too shaded-out, its nutrients a bit too over-tapped.
And yet, every year we end up with tomatoes aplenty. Enough for our canning and then some, and all for free.
Often it’s a neighbor with a bumper crop who can’t bear to see their overflow produce rot on the vine. One year it was a family friend who was going away in the late summer and needed their tomatoes harvested while they were gone. Only one season did we manage to grow our own to a generous harvest, a fluke. But somehow, despite our own failings, there are always tomatoes.
It’s a very specific providence.
This year I planned to grow our own. Now that I’m properly using the tilled-up bed that used to be lawn, slowly following my joy into recapturing my love of gardening, we finally have plenty of space in full sun to grow summer’s most fragrant fruit.
I didn’t quite get my act together in time to plant tomatoes from seed this year, but no bother. I bought eight starts from the local nursery instead, beautiful paste tomato plants, and kept them safe in the greenhouse, waiting for the weather to warm and the soil to be properly amended. It’s been a particularly cold spring, see, and tomatoes don’t like the chill.
And then…I got the text from a neighbor:
Do you guys need any tomato plants? I’ve got LOADS left over! They’re just going to go to waste! Please take some!
Since my love language is “free stuff”, I responded right away that I would come over and take a look.
Disembodied
I’ve been on a strange journey in my body and my brain, lately. Not really a “health journey” or anything like that, just an evolving sense of who I am as I get older. What I’m made of, I guess. The core of me as an incarnational image-bearing being.
It’s apt, because we live in an increasingly disembodied age. The rise of certain technologies like AI in all its forms has left us scrambling for answers to questions that used to feel simplistic, too easy: What really makes us human? How are we unique? Can we truly be replicated in art, culture, work, or society by advanced enough technology?
As these questions become more common and the answers less clear, I’ve caught myself retreating from my own body more often, severing it from my brain. Scrolling Notes here on Substack, or flipping through short videos on YouTube. Grasping for quick hits of dopamine that don’t require contemplation or critical thinking. Escaping into a sort of disassociative state.
This is a habit I’ve had for a long time in my adult life, a sense of feeling “unmoored” when things get too overwhelming, but the older I get the more aware I am of how much of a waste of precious time it is. Emerging from a scrolling session to discover that I’ve murdered an hour, two hours, doing literally nothing.
In therapy I’m learning more about these tendencies, forgiving myself for them, and exploring how best to heal from them. Making a regular habit of yoga is a big one, a physical showing-up that has been a comfort to me for decades now, as a way to re-engage my body and brain in a tangible way.
And, of course, gardening. Digging in the soil with my own hands as I plant potatoes. Trimming dead leaves off of the broccoli plants. Weeding fragrant—yet hilariously invasive—lemon balm out of a spare bed so I can put tuck lettuce and kale seedlings in it. These things connect all of the parts of me, marry body and brain. They create a bridge of threads, often delicate, that keeps me present.
The Impossibility of Poetry
I’ve written before about a pet theory I have about AI, what’s missing in it. But I’ll reiterate it here.
While generative AI can find the formulas to replicate certain aspects of human culture, like imagery, text, and music—things that have patterns and rules—there’s one thing that I’m convinced it’ll never be able to do properly. And that’s poetry.
Not “poetry” as in the ability to rhyme; a computer could certainly figure that out.
But poetry, as in the idiosyncratic ability to connect two unalike things and make the connection feel relatable.
At its best, poetry is the journey from one place to another in a way that you can feel rather than intellectualize. For example, one of the things I love about the poet Billy Collins is the way he starts with one image and takes us on a short walk through his mind, landing in another destination altogether within only a few stanzas, but we can feel the connection between the start and the end, even if it’s not obviously connected.
As a fellow human, we instinctually get it.
Human to human, we can take each other’s hands and walk each other through an inner journey. Good poetry is, at its heart, a very human experience. That’s what makes bad poetry so obvious: it doesn’t feel human.
Poetry is an echo of personhood. There is poetry, I think, in the marriage between body and brain. It is a unique thing that humans have, the often odd connection between sense and sentience. How working in a garden or playing an instrument or cooking a meal for a loved one or making a bed can heal something in us through its tangibility, its ritual.
It’s idiosyncratic: connection through contrast.
Poetry in this form is the story of the space between action and reaction, synapse and syntax, the experience and the telling.
All Path, No Pattern
So that brings us to the tomato plants.
When I arrived at the neighbor’s house, she had set out the plastic pots of tomatoes in cardboard flats on her patio. Suddenly I was glad I had elected to take the car over there: in all, there were twenty-five new tomato plants to add to our existing eight.
As I said: it’s a very specific providence.
“They’re a little leggy,” my neighbor said, apologetic. “They really need to go in the ground soon. I just don’t have the space for them.”
The plants were a bit leggy, it’s true: indeterminate tomato plants either vine upward (if given support) or trail along the ground, and these plants had already started to droop down under their own leafy weight, looking for soil to snake over. Some had developed blossoms, too, which is a Pacific Northwest springtime no-no. When tomatoes blossom too early it puts them at risk for disease or underdeveloped fruit, and our May has been strangely cold this year.
“I’ll take them all,” I replied. Because—as I said—free stuff is my love language.
And she was delighted. There’s a special kind of relief a gardener feels when they know the plants they grew from seed aren’t going to go to waste, even into the compost bin.
We loaded the plants into the car, and their unique aroma wrapped around me as I drove the short road home. On my own patio, I sat in the sun and sorted the plants into groups based on what variety they were. I pinched off their little early-budding blooms, whispering, “Not yet. I’m sorry, not yet. Soon. Just a few more weeks.” And then I tucked them into the greenhouse with the ones I already bought, to await their day in the summer sun.
It’s not a groundbreaking story. It’s a very small thing, a normal thing, a deeply mundane thing. Yet even in the smallness of it, that afternoon, I felt the weight: the charge to double down on our humanity in an increasingly disembodied age. I felt the invitation to be all of it at once: the neighbor, the receiver, the leggy plants, and the warm patio. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s a feeling, not a formula. All path, no pattern.
It’s poetry.
And I hope with this meditation I properly walked you through the journey, connected the disparate dots between origin and destination.
I hope, as a fellow human, you instinctually get it.
You receiving tomato plants: “a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one!”
Me, reading about it on WP: “a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one!”
The “disembodied” notion has come up for me in lots of places lately! Culture wants us to trust only our minds, our “logical” thoughts and plans (however those might be defined) and ignore a goodly portion of our bodily sensory input, because listening to our bodies is too “woo-woo.” As Martha Beck put it in a podcast I heard recently, “Your body IS empirical! It’s the most empirical thing you have!” So thank you for the reminder that, indeed, I should do some yoga today.
P.S. Giant mounds of lemon balm are springing up all around my garden too. 😆