The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (31 page)

Another story was about ten-year-old girls at a summer camp who chose to feed a dead guinea pig to their large exotic snake; what was hopeful to the storyteller was the matter-of-fact reaction of the girls, a realness. Another story was about a professor’s children who were visiting their dad on campus when they decided to make a sign:
Students, Stop Walking Around Doing Nothing
. They decorated the sign with pictures of the earth and peace signs.

What I really want to say is that these stories seem small compared to the enormity of the problems. Gandhi, however, pointed out that big problems need small solutions. Big problems need one courageous and willing person. Big problems need you doing what you desire to do and doing it with great authority, great knowledge, and great love. Maybe, just maybe, once you have picked up a tool at hand and started to work, someone will say of you, using a wonderful African proverb implying that someone is attempting something far beyond what is comfortable or maybe even possible for them: “She has gone in search of the fabulous birds of the sea.”

Let’s also get clear about hope. After talks I’ve been asked a hundred times—
Am I hopeful? How do I find hope? Do I stay hopeful? How?

The assumption is that hope is a prerequisite for action. Without hope one becomes depressed and then unable to act. For many years I tried to say that I find hope in nature. Not long ago somebody asked me the question again and suddenly I thought,
Hope? Who needs hope?

Do you feed your daughter because you have hope that she’ll turn out okay? Hope is important to me, but I want to stress that I do not act because I have hope. I act whether I have hope or not. It is useless to rely on hope as motivation to do what’s necessary and just and right. Why doesn’t anybody ever talk about love as motivation to act?

Let me be even more truthful. It’s not hope or love that keep me going. It’s fight, which I will define as a life force surging in my heart.

So the question
How do I stay hopeful?
becomes as ludicrous as
How do I stay love-filled?
I’ll tell you how. I wake every morning listening to the great-crested flycatcher call from the pear tree and I watch that fat old orange sun, always burning, rise flamboyantly over the pecan orchard. I watch Green Glaze collards go to seed. I watch hummingbirds in the red valentines of pigeon peas. Bottle-feeding the new calves after dark, I watch bats hunting insects. Before bed I walk outside and gaze up through the bare limbs of the swamp chestnut oak into the starry, starry sky above Red Earth Farm and I watch a meteor blaze a trail to earth.

I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.

We are going to have to fall in love with place again and learn to stay put.

We are going to have to fall in love with each other.

We are going to have to learn courage and take action.

We are going to have to ignore that good ideas have been marginalized and rush them back to the center of attention.

One winter night I dreamed a marvelous dream. In it I watched a man jump from a plane. A colorful parachute opened against a tie-dyed, Technicolor sky. The air swirled with primary colors—in starbursts, vivid sundogs, spirals—like one of those six-inch-wide multicolored lollipops. Then I noticed a bicycle hanging from the parachute and I watched the man begin to pedal around through the universe. That was the totality of the dream but when I woke, I understood it to be a dream of possibility. We are leaping into the universe, and not only will we be given a parachute to save ourselves, we will be able to steer our course.

I am reminded of the quote from William Rivers Pitt, “The final truth is self-evident. You are the one you’ve been waiting for.”

I say, It’s the New Moon. Plant intentions. Don’t burn them in a fire. Get really, really clear. It’s going to be a powerful time. Sink into the place underground that seeds deserve.

I say, Rev up your awesome. Look around, so many people have put their shoulders into the load. You. Find a place to push. Pick up a tool—a hoe or a shovel. Start turning the compost bin, to make the soil in which the seed will grow. You will begin at the center, the center of many concentric circles that expand further and further out from you. You soon will become a local hero and a local rock star, and from there your influence will wash outward, even across the globe, where so many people are rising up like germinating embryos to claim food sovereignty, to rescue local seeds, and to guard human civilization’s cornucopia. Come home. Have the courage to live the life you dream: There is nothing greater than this.

Many of our seeds have been lost forever. But we can protect what’s left and in our revolutionary gardens we can develop the heirlooms of the future.

Begin now.

ARE YOU GOING
to farmer up or just lie there and bleed?

BRIANNE GOODSPEED
, my editor at Chelsea Green, breathed life into this book. Any writer should be so lucky as to have an editor such as she. I owe her untold gratitude for her incredibly careful read of the manuscript, her brilliant edits, and the friendship that developed along the way. Thank you, Brianne.

I thank all the staff at Chelsea Green, especially Margo Baldwin, Joni Praded, Melissa Jacobson, and Patricia Stone. Thanks to Ben Watson for his guidance. Intern Alaina Smith created the resource pages and we are grateful for her work. Kelly Blair is the person responsible for the lovely cover. I thank Eric Raetz for copyedits, Shay Totten and the entire marketing team for their creativity, and Jenna Stewart for setting up author events.

Thanks to Sam Stoloff, my agent at Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

My friend Larry Kopczak read a late version of the manuscript and provided an incisive and transformative critique. Plant pathologist Albert Culbreath directed me to sources I needed. In addition, I am grateful to the following people for reviewing sections of the book in order to make sure I stayed on the right path: Dave Brown, Dave Cavagnaro, Albert Culbreath, Jack Daniel, Sylvia Davatz, Glenn Drowns, Doug Elliott, Yanna Fishman, Randolph Gardner, Jim Gerritsen, Steven Jones, Woody Malot, Julia Shipley, Tom Stearns, Douglas Tarver, and Raven Waters. I am deeply grateful to all of you.

My one regret is that the writing of a volume such as this is never done. Always there are more seed savers, brimming with beautiful stories, that I want to interview and to write about. I could do another volume entirely. If you are not in this book, please believe me when I say that I wanted you to be, and please know that I would love to visit your garden and hold your seed collection in my hands. I thank all seed savers around the world for your work. I thank all who have given me seeds.

A number of people inspired and encouraged me with their own books and actions, and those people include Suzanne Ashworth, Wendell Berry, Gary Nabhan, Vandana Shiva, and Jeffrey Smith. Through thick and thin Susan Cerulean has been my literary confidante, personal sage, and dear friend for over two decades. Although not listed here, my many and cherished friends give me strength and surround me with love. I thank you all.

In addition, I am deeply grateful to Michael Cichon, M.D.; Susan Ganio, R.N.; Lee Arnold, P.A.; and all the people who devoted themselves to healing me from chronic Lyme disease. Their warmth and kindness sustained me through some rough days. I thank Elaine Cichon and the Clinic of Angels for financial support. I am very grateful to Stephen King, Margaret Morehouse, and all at the Haven Foundation; and Lisa Collier Cool and Trustees of the American Society of Journalists and Authors Charitable Trust for a grant from the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund. Without all of them, I would not be well and could not have written this.

Without my ancestors, all the way back to the dawn of time, I would not have a chance to witness life on this beloved, breathtaking planet and I thank them. I especially thank my grandmother, Beulah Miller Branch, from whom I received the gift of my first seeds, as well as my parents, Franklin and Lee Ada Branch Ray.

I thank my son, Silas, and my husband, Raven, for their love and their faith in me.

For both the quiet resistance of gardeners and the vocal resistance of activists, I thank you. May it grow.