Affluence is everywhere today

Affluence is everywhere today and I can't be at home or on the internet or in my own head without feeling it expanding in every one of my cells and it is boiling through my body, overflowing here in this writing. Last night, I'm canning peaches at 10 pm but because I want to, not because I have to and when I got home from ten days away on Monday I threw out two ice cream pails of rotten produce to the chickens. Because why not let it go bad, we aren't starving, I planned poorly before our trip and we can buy more.

We flew on a plane to visit my parents because driving by myself with three kids for 12 hours is a lesson in sending me to the loony bin, but we can still go, plane tickets for four please. I ordered my son's homeschool curriculum with the click of a mouse and entered in my credit card info no problem, no problem at all. It's a luxury this homeschooling, because my hard-working husband earns enough and we are careful enough with money that I don't have to work. I'm fully conscious this week of the single mom working two jobs, dropping her kiddos at daycare before school even starts, missing her babies first day of kindergarten, coming home just to tuck them into bed. I'm crying for her or for myself or both as I write this.

Careful enough with money, what does that mean anyway? It means we own one old(er) vehicle, but my husband get's a company one so really it is no sacrifice. And just this morning I was thinking about wanting a bigger one because it is hard to fit all three kids car seats across the back seat. It means almost all the kids clothes come from the second hand store, but they are so nice you couldn't tell anyway and it means that we grow a garden and belong to a food coop to save on groceries. But we do it so we can eat healthy, our alternative is not noodles and hotdogs and food bank offerings. I don't shop for myself unless desperate because once I learned about slavery and infertile women left rejected by their families and spouses, as a result of dyeing fabric it took the fun out of it anyway. And we rarely eat out, and I don't shop, and wow, am I ever ill at my own ideas of sacrifice.

If I dropped my kids at school, I could take a yoga class (and I fantasize some days about doing just this) and get a latte from my favourite cafe. If I went to work, it would be for extras, like new vehicles and vacations and paying off our mortgage sooner. Or I could come home and write this uninterrupted and read a whole book and have a really clean house. But I don't and instead I am talking with friends who I love about what classes to send our kids too, for them to learn to swim, or play soccer or guitar or whatever. I'm planning what retreats I myself am going to this fall. On a day like today I don't know what is good and fine and beautiful and enough and what is luxury, luxury, luxury.

And here I am writing about it on the internet and yes, another rich white woman writing on the internet about her discomfort. Time and education and money to sit here in this space. Time to create.

Irony.

Luxury?

Because I know that right here in my own city today there are people without enough food and clothes (I mean I really know a few of them by name) and today children are dying around the world from lack of basics and does their mother love them less than I love my own. Is her grief different. I know it isn't.

I don't know what to do with this and our sponsor children and giving money and our careful spending and our volunteer work here just feel like less than nothing today. It's like sand between my teeth and I feel so uncomfortable in my own skin I want to run away from myself.

Because North America and Christ's bride the church, we believe that things like date nights and vacations and retreats and a beautiful home and ample food and lessons for our kids are well deserved and good and basic, if we are 'responsible' with our money. And I love all these things. Feel refreshed by them, inspired by them, grown by them.

What is a luxury now?

I ask for the mother who never has the free time to create, I ask for the kids who will never leave the city they were born in, I ask for the kid who spends all their after school hours watching TV, home alone. I ask for the women who are burying their starved children today and for the children who are 'orphaned' because their parents can't afford to keep them.

I ask for myself.

Lord have mercy.

Edited to add on February 1, 2014: Sharing over at Esther Emery's  site today for her syncroblog on spirit of the poor.

I arrived home from vacation

I arrived home from vacation to this: Somewhere under that pile of weeds (chickweed and stinging nettle mostly) is my veggie garden.

There are so many things I love about gardening. Looking through seed catalogues with my kiddos in the depths of winter, picking and dreaming of what we will grow in the summer. The happy day when everyone in the family pitches in to get all the promising seeds into the newly tilled ground. Watching with joy as we see the seedlings emerge. Cheap, organic, zero carbon footprint food that fills our plates all summer and our freezer, cold room and jars for the winter. The flavour that can't be beat of fresh from the garden food. Seeing my kids pick and eat all sorts of things they wouldn't if they came from the grocery store. Having a little bit of self-sufficiency and passing on those skills to my kids. Discovering wild critters who have made homes in and among our plants. Yes gardening can be very, very good and often zen. Peaceful. Life-affirming. Joyful.

My family has now been gardening long enough now to have a history. For many years we had a plot at my communities wonderful community garden. Everything grew beautifully (except that one year the tomatoes got late blight). The dirt was some of the best in our area, few weeds, no need to water and tons of harvest. We got a large percentage of our yearly vegetables from our plot. Enough carrots, bean, tomatoes, squash and potatoes to last us almost until the next summer. Many more things to eat fresh all summer. And we eat a lot of veggies.

Two years ago we moved out to the county. There wasn't a big garden at our property, but I had dreams of one. There was an existing raspberry patch, which is so bountiful this year and a few neglected flower beds with overgrown perennials, which I am in the process of replanting with herbs and colourful flowers. A bed beside the garage that I ripped overgrown shrubs from now holds many tomato plants. The first summer (the one we moved during) we kept our community garden until we could put in a veggie plot at our new to us house.

When last summer arrived we scraped the turf off a section of land and had garden mix hauled in. Everything was planted and coming up beautifully, until we received record rain fall for the entire summer and the garden mix turned out to be almost all clay. My garden was one big weedy mud pit all summer, from which we harvested a half an ice cream bucket of potatoes and the same of carrots because most of the veggie plants drowned. The only saving grace was the separate tomato patch which kept us in canned tomatoes, sauce and salsa all year.

(My sister said with wisdom I believe, when I was telling her about my garden last week, that you often get more veggies from a small garden area than from a big one. It is easier to make sure your dirt is nutrient dense, weeds are picked and pests are dealt with. Resulting in bigger yields. Yes I agree with her. Learning the hard way.)

I felt frustrated and sad that a whole gardening season was for nothing. I had really hoped for my biggest harvest ever, and instead had my smallest. But we are not moving anytime soon, and I am determined to make this garden grow, so this spring we hauled in peat moss, compost and sand. My husband tilled it in and we planted in the improved soil. Some seeds came up, some didn't (too old I am thinking). And all year there has been my never-ending forest of weeds. If you can believe it my husband had roto-tilled between the rows and I had weeded just two weeks before the picture.

Thankfully we have had some successes. Our first asparagus crop. Bowls of fresh strawberries for the past week. Raspberries now, as many as we can eat and enough for jam and smoothies all winter. Spinach and lettuce (more than we can keep up with) starting in June. Tomatoes are looking great. And some veggies are starting to thrive amidst the weeds. I am now the Ann Voskamp of gardening, counting each gift tirelessly.

Gardening this year has also been really hard work. Weeding is my least zenish aspect of gardening and I have been doing a lot of it. Way more than I would ever care to do. But, I am stubborn enough that I won't give up, and I tackled the rest of the weeds today with my husband, kids running around in between the rows, helping intermittently. After many, many hours this week my garden is mostly weed free for now.

Weeding is good for one thing. It gives me time to think. Time to pray. Time to rejoice. (Babies! Ocean! My family! My friends!) Time to lament. (Mosquitoes! Broken relationships! Not figuring out God!) Time to reflect on why I am persevering with this whole gardening thing instead of just hitting up my local grocery store. Time to connect with my kids and husband. More time to pray. Gardening as spiritual discipline.

Truth is it feels a bit sacrificial, in my small, spoiled, North American way to bend low, cake my fingernails with mud, and grow something my family can eat. Do something that isn't fun for me. Until I get these weeds under control and the dirt rich and fertile, the time trade off is more than it would cost to buy at the store, or even the farmer's market, and I see value in that. I like doing something for much less than I would make at my job because it is more on par with how much others in the world make.

I like how the struggle to get things to grow, makes me think of others around the world who grow things because they have to in order for people they love not to die, not because it is a hobby, or they want organic. I like how this motivates me to pray for them and their kids while my hands are stinging from the nettle I just pulled. How the minor stinging and the mud and the sore back remind me how extremely easy my life is in comparison to so many others. How it reminds me of the physical sacrifice, the sacrifice of time, that others make for all those cheap, abundant things to be available at the store.

I like how my kids see me doing something hard, help do something physical. I hope they are learning, that I am learning, that life and relationships won't always be easy and hard work is necessary, hard work is good. That it can take hard work to find beauty. That it will take hard work to change the world. That it will take hard work to change ourselves. That there are ups and downs to almost everything in life and that is normal. As I pull each weed I pray for them, I pray for me, I pray for everyone, as I pull and toss. Don't give up hope. Pull, toss. Don't give up hope. Pull, toss. Don't give up hope. This growing can be hard. It can be good and holy and beautiful too.