It is cabbage season in East Tennessee.
I did not plant cabbage. Cabbages are space hogs. Cabbage is readily available from local farmers. The goal was never self-sufficiency.
The green cabbage was a planned farmer’s market purchase. Napa was a surprise, and a pleasant one at that. Sauerkraut and kimchi are the order of the week.
I made my own kimchi before I ever made sauerkraut. Initially, I made my own kimchi because much commercially available kimchi contains either soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients and if I wanted kimchi I had no alternative. I first wrote about making kimchi in this post, in 2016. I ended up loving kimchi more than I imagined, ended up loving the process of fermentation, and eventually decided to try my own sauerkraut as well.
So in a way the garden was about having something I wanted and needing to make it myself, it was never about self-sufficiency. Nor really is it about independence, but rather about dependence, about connecting my life to the world beneath my feet and the air I breathe. The plan was to grow some things, but also to depend on local farmers for some things. It is about interdependence, about relationship. Fermentation too has reminded me that life depends on relationship, relationship to each other, relationship to the earth, relationship to the seasons, and processes and nourishment that this earth provides us, and also then about the cycle of life and the relationship between life and decay.
There is a myth in this country, in this society, that we are independent and self-determinant, that we can pull ourselves “up by our bootstraps” and make it on our own. But of course we can’t. We may be privileged beneficiaries of a system that allows us to perpetuate this belief. We may have invented many wonderful things that have allowed us to believe that our fate is not tied to the fate of this earth and its own cycle of life. We may think we can reduce life and food and even success to simple formulae, but in the end all of these schemes miss the essential transformation of community, of the community of elements, and minerals, and life that make up our bodies, our environments, our societies and ultimately that feed our soul.
Perhaps this time-out the world has been going through has only strengthened my already burgeoning understanding that we are really not separate from the cycles of this planet which gives us life, despite our repeated determination to prove ourselves masters of our own fate. Perhaps, for me at least, it started with kimchi. Fermentation, a process of slow transformation, renewed my connection to earth, to food, to life, to death, and to community. Perhaps kimchi, and sauerkraut, remind me also of the way we are connected to each other, and that our relationships, and our need for them, are not instant things that can be manufactured, that they are a process of slow evolution. Perhaps social distancing has reminded me of these same slow processes, reminded me that we need community, but not shallow community. We need the deeper community of connection, the community that transforms and makes something bigger than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it reminded me that control is an illusion, and a drug. The problem with control is that someone always pulls the strings, and everyone else buys into the illusion and is controlled.
This week, perhaps I will simply take my chances with cabbage, with sauerkraut and kimchi. I can control my own actions, but I cannot control the outcome. With luck, and there is always an element of luck no matter how we tell ourselves otherwise, I will end up with something wonderful. Or I will start again.
