Sunny War // Walking Contradiction (feat. Steve Ignorant)

Post by Misha //

Something I didn’t appreciate about starting a garden is how much I would want to be outside in it all day. Several people did try to warn me, but I didn’t take them seriously. Yesterday I started some vegetable seeds. Today all I want to do is go out and spread compost on the beds, put some stakes in the ground for a trellis, chop in the cover crops, and generally squat around with my hands in the dirt until it gets too cold to continue.

This morning, completely by coincidence, I read a Wendell Berry essay from 1970 which has this to say about gardening:

“A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important: he is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as a traffic impediment, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of humanity’s dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful.”

–Wendell Berry, Think Little

Then I listened to this song from Sunny War’s powerhouse of an album, which has an absolutely gutting lyric about gardening that I will let you discover for yourselves, but which, for obvious reasons, hit me especially hard today.

So I appreciate that the universe is trying to educate me, not particularly subtly, on the nothing-short-of-radical importance of getting out to the garden. But alas, it is raining and I have to go to work.

Buy Sunny War’s new album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, here.