greening

In the morning, after I’ve fixed myself a cup of coffee, I’ve begun to take it upstairs to my rooftop deck, a place which affords a spacious view of my beloved city. Years ago a friend told me it was too exposed and windy to grow things, and I believed her. What was that about? How many times have I heeded bad advice and stopped some potential garden from blooming? For it’s a veritable garden that now flourishes on my deck, fragrant and lush. Orange and lemon trees, lavender, rosemary, jasmine, sage and rose are spreading their roots and bursting out of the pots I’ve planted them in. I can’t remember the day or circumstance when I decided to follow my own instinct, but it happened a few months back. I started buying plants for the deck and assuming they would survive. They have. In fact, they are thriving. Maybe it has to do with the house being opened up, with walls coming down and energy moving. Maybe some part of me is ready to be fully alive and vibrant and on top of the world. Whatever the case, my rooftop garden suffuses me with pleasure.

On my trip to New York City, the most magical thing I returned with was several jars of rooftop honey from city bees, bought at the flea market across from the Natural History Museum. The very thought of bees traversing that big city, going from rooftop garden to rooftop garden and back to their rooftop hives, makes me hopeful for the future. Buzzing, fragrance and honey amidst the concrete and traffic, this is the kind of sweet greening this world needs.

Years ago my coven and our partners bought an old commune 2 ½ hours above the city. It was and is part of a big land association formed back in the early 1970’s during the “back to the land” movement. I’m lucky to have it, and it continues to inspire fantasies of “living off the land” when and if it gets too hard to live in the city. Being a child of the 60’s and 70’s, that fantasy is deeply etched in my psyche, carrying with it a kind of righteousness that by living in the country I’d be more environmentally attuned and closer to nature.

Lately I’ve begun to question this. If we all moved back to the land, there’d be no wild. Few can afford any amount of land in the country, which is why the movement to go back to the land stayed a movement of privilege. Cities just may be the most earth friendly ways for us to organize ourselves, especially if we populate our rooftops with gardens and bees. Fruit trees lining the streets might be a good idea as well. For us humans, wrestling with how to live more sustainably on this earth probably means figuring out to how to live in urban areas full of verdant gardens.

As I sat on my deck this morning, I thought about the community garden in Los Angeles that is fighting for its life. Fourteen acres located in an industrial district, it has 360 plots and feeds as much and more. There’s currently a fight, not unlike the early battles for People’s Park in Berkeley so many years back, to keep this garden from being demolished. The stories emerging, brought back from activist friends of mine, are the kinds that inspire hope of a real revolution of compassion. I have a feeling that the gardens will survive, and that the gardeners will come out of this having become a family with a wide circle of friends, all having seeded a vision of cities all over ripe with patches of vegetables and fruit.

A brilliant green hummingbird hovered on my deck this morning, drawn to the colors and scents of my rooftop garden. There’s magic in creating gardens, in planting the spell of a seed, of encasing roots in new dirt, of watering and tending green life. I have my place in the country, but right here and now, I feel hope is in the green of cities. My roots are here.