The Quick Fix
a devotional for late spring
Thank you for joining us!
First, a little bit of housekeeping…
You may not notice this if you only read The WP via email, but if you’re a regular visitor to the website then you’ll be greeted with a whole new look, this week! This newsletter is around 1.5 years old now, and Substack has added so many incredible features since we started here, so I’m enjoying bringing The Wildroot Parables up to speed as far as aesthetics and ease of navigation.
To Notice:
The “Start Here!” Page: this is a new landing page where you can find the most important links to help you navigate around. Most importantly, I am working hard to tag EVERY post—even past ones—with its type (devotional/discussion/essay/resource) and its season (spring/summer/fall/winter). On the Start Here! page you’ll see all of those tags as links, so you can easily explore a list of every spring post, every devotional, etc. I’m still in the midst of categorizing (it’s a lot of posts!) but we’re nearly there!
New Photos: Can I confess something? Finding and uploading photos to posts has always been my least favorite part of online writing. Despite my love of photography, I always saw this aspect of the craft as a chore. But now that Substack provides its own stock photo service, this task is SO much easier and more accessible to me! I’ll probably leave images off of the initial emails to make them easier and faster to load and read on most email services, but once they’re sent out I’ll add a photo on the site.
Those are the two biggest changes you’ll see on the website, along with a few other little things here and there, so feel free to tap around and let me know what you think!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
On last week’s meditation on St. Brendan the Navigator,
commented:You should read the book A Desert in the Ocean: The Spiritual Journey According to St. Brendan the Navigator by David Adam. It's about entering fully into the eternal in the midst of the everyday. The author invites us to consider whether God is calling us to live more adventurously, to extend ourselves, to seek new horizons. Sometimes that adventure is a physical trip, other times it can be seeing our backyard with newfound sight.
I love the recommendation and the wise insight, H. Jacob Sandigo! Thank you so much for sharing! H. Jacob Sandigo writes a newsletter here on Substack called Son Of The Moment, which he himself delightfully describes as “a jester of Jesus ponders the present age”. If that delights you as much as it delights me, go check it out!
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
the fresh garden is alive with songbirds bobbing through the new oats snatching bugs from the leaves and marveling at the loss of the dead grass; do you remember what used to be here? what once was a wasteland is now covered in dewdrops, buzzing with curious flies and guarded by robins amazed to find a banquet of earthworms where there had never been any before.
A few weeks ago, our generous neighbor came over with his tractor and tilled up a generous 30-foot by 30-foot space in our lawn for the eventual expansion of our vegetable garden. Since then, I’ve done some research and gathered some advice on how to proceed, but it all seems to boil down to one thing:
“You need new soil.”
And this makes sense. The dirt under our old lawn, now exposed to sun and wind and rain, is not very fertile. It doesn’t have the beautiful, dark, coffee-grounds richness of soil that’s been mixed through with organic material. It’s not alive with microbes and earthworms, yet. It’s just red-brown dirt, clods of moss and weed roots still clinging to it.
But I’m stubborn, and I find myself disagreeing with the conclusion that, in order to have a fertile garden, I need to spend buckets of money on trucking in new soil from somewhere else. True, this solution would be faster. But I’m not convinced that it would be better.
I have a pet notion that working with what I have, instead of bringing in what I don’t have, will ultimately make for a happier, healthier, longer-lasting garden. That building up the soil with organic material is worth trying, first.
This takes time. But it seems to me that the extra time is worth it.
Since the initial tilling, I’ve sown a cover crop of oats, buckwheat, and black-oil sunflowers. I’ve also dotted the space with zucchini seeds as my “canaries in the coal mine” for how fertile the existing dirt really is. These have all been growing beautifully so far, turning the bare dirt into a carpet of green. They’ll continue to grow and flower all through summer until fall, blessing the bees and butterflies, when my neighbor will come back and till the cover crop under as a natural green manure. Over winter, I’ll sow rye to keep the ground from hardening under the punishing rain and frost. And in the following spring, we’ll till again, adding more green to the soil.
And by then, we may have something quite special. Alive.
This process is slow. But it will give the fertility of our garden a depth that I’m not convinced it would have with the quick fix of “brand-new soil” from some company somewhere.
And the metaphor is clear, at least to me: there are no quick fixes for real transformation. If you want something to thrive, patience is required. Waiting is always worth it, in the end.
At least, that’s what I stubbornly believe.
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Hambone and I have been talking about dirt recently. At the turn of the 1900s there was a resurgence of “muscular christianity” which emphasized fitness and nature and our-body-as-a-temple. This movement gave us the likes of Theodore Roosevelt.
Ill give you and readers here a spoiler for things coming to the Peasant Times-Dispatch. Hambone asked “what is our adjective? How would we explain the peasant philosophy? X Christianity?”
After chewing on it and going back and forth, I suggested “Dirt Christianity”. We loved that, It gets at the humility we are going for and emphasizes language Christ used in parables.
My favorite example: the parable of the sower. The mustard seed is faith, and it comes from God. *We are the dirt*. And not in a degrading way, but an ennobling way--if we worry about our spiritual soil, the seed Christ plants in is can bare good fruit. If we let worries and distractions overcrowd us, we will choke it with thorns.
There is no quick fix for our souls, no shortcuts to transformation. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
This is a great and inspirational message and lines up perfectly with things that have been on my mind!
Thank you, SE!
If you can get it, there is nothing better than well rotted horse manure for building up soil. I started on thin, derelict soil 20 years ago and it's great now. I should say it doesn't take 20 years! Also make your own compost from your fruit/vegetable parings and unbleached paper/cardboard (avoid anything printed). Don't forget that beans and legumes fix nitrogen in the soil so if you can buy legume seed for a cover crop it is well worth doing. Above all, enjoy engaging with the soil and nature but from your post above, you're already doing that successfully!