Those of you who have read this blog previously may have picked up on my Zen Buddhist worldview. I view garden tending time as quiet reflective walking meditation although I am not perfect at it by any means. I am an imperfect seeker who begins journeys but I do not necessarily follow the path to the very end because I am not end-motivated but rather journey-motivated. Gardening from this perspective makes for a more harmonious experience because I am not pining for the end of the plant life cycle but am admiring the whole process of growing.

But I also garden for what is a much darker nefarious reason; one that I fear makes me look like a nut instead of a level headed scientist who is on a zen path.

What could that possibly be?

Its something which I have great attachment to (in the zen sense), something which has me at the visceral level, the deepest seated of my fears.

I fear that I am not preparing my children for their future well enough to help them survive the tough times we are in for. It’s the boogey man that haunts my fitful dreams and skitters into dark corners when I wake in a start.

We Americans are taught that we get schooled to be competitive so that we can make money. Some of us learn that making money in itself is the goal. I wasn’t taught that. I was taught that I had to make money to survive (but not in love of money).

I have a sense that we are living in times where we can not teach our kids the same thing. They will not be able to compete in a world where the structures and institutions that we compete in now (companies, universities, etc) will be crumbling as the country crumbles under the weight of post-peak oil and economic collapse.

Which is the more humane and rational path?

- nudge your child down the educational path I took that ended in a PhD in science which is severely inhibited due to malignant neglect by the government .. this path most criminally requires the student to incur massive debt at a time when the student is least likely to be able to afford the burden.

- not nudge your child into higher education (and skip the MASSIVE DEBT that is built into the college experience now) but opting out of that immoral boondoggle and find some other solution that gets the child an education (for humanity’s sake) but still allows the child to develop skills that actually support her survival.

I am pretty sure I do not want my kids to suffer my fate and my school loan experiences – that’s just an inhumane thing to do to anyone.

I do not know really what to do at this point. Do I get the kids trained up in self-sufficiency skills (like the garden and my older child’s chicken husbandry) or plumbing? (Plumbers surely get better pay that your average scientist and have at least 1000% more job security).

Should they learn how to plant feed crops for our chickens and goats and other future subsistence animals or do we teach them some internet based skill that can bring in some money (cant fathom what that is for now).

I am leaning toward a “both” answer. I need my children to become educated but it doesn’t require traditional means (obviously, otherwise we would not be homeschooling) but I also need them to be prepared to live self-sufficiently. My ideal would be for them to become important contributors to solving some of the intermediate problems (anything from becoming a climate change scientist to becoming an activist that helps others become self-sufficient to other visionary activities). I also want them to be building on what we are starting with our own little post-modern homestead that still needs a lot of work to be self-sufficient.

So many considerations.

The problem is that NO ONE is talking about how the educational paradigm we have right now with respect to undergraduate schooling has become an obscene credit-scheme and not about the kids learning anything that they can really use to put food on the table.

NO ONE is talking about how we as parents of young kids are not prepared for training our kids to survive, just how to compete in the status quo.

I wonder if I sound like a nut to you?! I hope not and I can assure you that we are not theist isolationists putting up barbed wire and loading up the guns.

I am just fretting and planting the seeds of our future and uncertain Garden of Eden in a post-oil world. Just wish I didn’t feel so alone.

Recently, I had a car accident (a rather scary close call) that has put me much more into a metaphysical state of mind versus practicalities.

Gardening generally is very practical and I love it for that. The garden is somewhat like a cat in that it doesn’t scream for attention except for when it really needs it. It doesn’t hurt and it does help to pet it on a daily basis though. I am much more of a cat person. If my garden were more like a dog, needing to be walked (weeded) with a 100% certainty several times a day, the joy of it would fly away.

I LIKE to weed because I choose to do it (as in, it’s a part of the gardening flow) and I approach it with a sense of wonder and investigation.

I knew I liked it too much when I found myself asking for a book of weeds and how to identify them (the store keeper was surprised for the question and then more so when she realized no such book existed in her store). I have not googled much for it so there may very well be many well established books on the identification of weeds in the Northeastern states of the US.

All I do know is that I can identify a weed as it sprouts but I have no names for them.. there are no names except for the expletives that escape on occasion. The ones that came late in the season (wind borne?) that I hate with a serious passion? The painful tricky prickly evil stinging weed that affected every bed. One mission of mine this year is to track those down the moment they rear their evil little seedling heads. They are much harder to see though because they take refuge under more mature plants (they like shade). My secret weapon, for many different reasons, will be red and black polymer mulching and row covers.

Because we humans tend to build templates from past experience to frame our expectations, I find that I experience my garden within the whole motherhood-spectrum.

Early spring is a time for “trying to conceive”. If you have ever had problems conceiving you would know what it feels like – anticipation, excitement, concern, disappointment, sadness, and then cycling through that again and again.

Thankfully, with gardening, the conception can be controlled a bit more, the early development can be troubleshot much better, and the numbers of offspring are much higher so success can mitigate some of the losses.

I am sure you can extend that metaphor yourself.

As an experienced mom, I know that right now, before we get our seedlings growing indoors, I am going through the thought-conception process where I am recognizing and acknowledging the transformative process of gardening (motherhood).

It fits in or is augmented right now by the metaphysical sort of mood brought on by the near death experience. Some might prefer to not linger on such thoughts but it is my way, always have been. It will build important feelings and investment in my garden later, as I watch growth and participate in the transformation.

As a mother, it will always be a bittersweet experience and not a rote exercise. I am glad for that.

Like my garden, things have been sort of dormant around here and I apologize for that. I am hoping to even things out more in years to come so that there is content all year long. Like gardening, this blog is a long term project because things, people, thoughts, take time to grow.