Last week the Center hosted two groups of youth, one primarily people of color, one primarily white people. As the groups co-navigated the space of the Center and the programming, it was pretty clear to everyone why we talk about race and an analysis of racism as a gateway to serving in the New Orleans community. This week the Center is filled with another group, this one primarily white people from a place of primarily white people. Many in this group have been coming to New Orleans to volunteer for years and some are not sure why they have to talk about race and racism each time they come – other than that it seems to be the price of the trip to New Orleans. There are moments of joy in the work of unraveling oppression and moments of despair.

As I write, my garden fills with love bugs, lettuce, stinging caterpillars, and thyme. Despair and joy ripple through this Earth Day 2014. Those with power to change the laws and hold those who are destroying the Earth’s ability to sustain life as we know it are busy arguing semantics and pocketing short-term profits. Perhaps this is not surprising in a country founded on the belief that land could be bought and worked at the expense of human life.

And so we have to talk. To each other. About uncomfortable truths.

Our silence will not protect us… will not make sure that my niece and your child have trustworthy water and air that will not poison them. The environmental crisis of the Gulf and West Virginia has moved inland with the advent of fracking. White people are learning that their whiteness will not protect them from the brutality of our current economic system, from the impact of decades of valuing imaginary numbers over real life.

And here we are, called to continue the struggle for collective liberation – imperfectly, madly, hopefully… Happy Earth Day, beloveds. Let’s talk to each other.

I don’t know about where you are, but here in California we have hit the peak of Weed Season. A few days of long-awaited rain, a couple of days of sun, and the hills begin to turn gloriously green. So does my gravel driveway, and whole swaths of my yard where you are supposed to be able to actually see the things that I’ve planted.

I have to say there is a certain glory to wrenching vast, bushy weeds from the rain-damp soil, filling the 96-gallon green waste bin to overflowing. That was last week. And the week before. OK, and the week before that. And there are plenty more weeds all around the yard, but in my mind it has moved on to lawn time.

Let me explain. I have a big, well, “lawn” probably isn’t the right term. I’m not a fan of the kinds of chemicals that it takes to maintain a pristine lawn, nor the quantities of water. Apparently the previous owners weren’t either. What I have might be better described as a mostly-green, mostly-flat space that serves me well as a place for dog training. But it only works well as a dog training space if it’s mostly free of the kinds of weeds that grow burrs and needle-like seed pods and generally anything prickly. Which, it turns out, is most of your common weeds, which got so common by sticking their seeds onto anything that moves and spreading themselves around.

So I have spent time every spring, for the last several years, meticulously pulling out every little potentially prickly weed that I could get my fingers on. Little weeds. By the thousands. Every year. Which, it turns out, provides a person of ministerial or poetic bent such as myself with ample opportunity to think about the other kinds of weeds we pull up in our lives.

There are the giant, ugly weeds like racism, classism, heterosexim, ableism and all the others. Weeds which we root out and think are gone, until something catches the corner of our eye, or someone else points out that something bushy and threatening has grown while we weren’t looking. These kinds of weeds tend to have roots deep underground that we aren’t even aware of, and they can grow awfully fast under the right conditions.

But today I’m thinking more about the lawn weeds, the little insidious ones that you don’t see until you sit down on the ground, but which will overtake your life if you just let them grow. Weeds of insecurity and shame. Weeds of pride and superiority. Weeds of greed and anger and jealousy and, really, all of those classic deadly sins.

Even when you’re looking straight at these little buggers it can be hard to tell just what you’re seeing. You could easily think you were cultivating righteous anger when self-righteous indignation was really sprouting from the root. Shame can masquerade as humility, although they are not even related species. Heart-felt longing and greed can look the same until the tendrils begin to take over.

I am no expert gardener, but I’ve learned a few things over all my years of plucking weeds. I know that the weeds will always be with us, blown in on the wind or sprouting up from roots that we will never manage to pull out in their entirety. Pulling weeds is not a job that is ever complete. But I also know that it makes a difference. Weeds that once threatened to take over my lawn—or my heart—now are pretty much relegated to the edges. Pretty much. The percentages change. And every time you root out something that you really didn’t want as part of your landscape you make room for something else to grow.

Weeding and watering and living in gratitude for the rain and the sun. That’s what we gardeners of the spirit do.

People regularly say to me that they wouldn’t want to live in California, because they would miss the seasons. As a California native who has lived in a variety of other places, I understand this. Who would want to miss the seasons of Oh My God it is Really Snowing in April, or It’s So Hot and Humid I Literally Feel as if I Am Melting? But the fact that we give those lovely seasons a miss doesn’t mean that we are without seasons here by the San Francisco Bay. At the moment, for instance, it is the season of Raking Leaves.

True, the weather is dry and sunny, and we’re expecting a high of 70 degrees, but the leaves are turning yellow and drifting into heaps along the driveway. Paradise makes fewer demands on a person than harsher climes, but there are still things that need to be done. Raking leaves is one of them.

There are worse jobs. Dry leaves aren’t heavy, and the scritch, scritch sound of the rake forms its own kind of meditative chant. There are many good ways to rake leaves: setting them as mulch around your garden or piling them in the green waste bin or creating great mountains for kids or dogs to play in. You can use a wide broom if you’re of a very tidy persuasion. Just please, please, never a leaf blower. You can’t think over the sound of a leaf blower. Heck, your neighbors can’t think over the sound of your leaf blower.

And thinking is what raking leaves is for. Raking Leaves is the season to remember that even in paradise, things die, that we and everyone we love will all drift to the ground at last.  That each of our lives is merely one little leaf, different but nearly indistinguishable from every other little leaf. That we belong to a tree that will remain standing long after we are gone, whose branches are visible even in the height of summer, if we would care to look, but are so much clearer in this time of stripping down. Raking leaves, one might even consider that the only way to truly connect with the deep roots of that great tree would be to fall, and become soil, and so become nourishment for the larger whole.

Raking leaves, smelling the faint, sharp odor of decay that has already begun, one might long for the rain to finally come and nourish the thirsty ground, turning the hills green once again. Or one might wish for the bright days to never end, to live always in this comfort and beauty. Either way, if you spend long enough raking leaves you will be forced to admit that you have no control, that the rain will come or not come precisely on its own schedule, without your longings having the slightest effect. That the world will give you leaves or grass or flowers or dry earth exactly as it will, and that all you can do is to show up, rake or trowel or hose in hand, and do your best to be grateful for what you are given, and to honor the giver.

The echinacea, once vibrant pink, is now black.

A friend told me that the word for aster in Hungarian means, literally, end of summer.

This time of year, as we approach Halloween, The Day of the Dead, and All Saints’ Day, I am often thinking of death. Granted, I am always a little bit morbid—my astrologer sister would say it’s because I’m a Scorpio. (I regret that I was too old to go Goth in my teen years, because I suspect I might have enjoyed that.) But right now, death is often lurking just under my mind’s surface.

My garden is one of the sources of my thoughts, and it is a place where there is plenty of room for such thoughts. This lovely, non-judgmental community of green friends, lets me think about whatever I fancy. And the garden is full of death. Every day I am pulling up or lopping off plants that have given their all—the perennials having given it for this year and likely to return, the annuals having lived their whole life in this one year. Farewell, I say to the enormous squash plant, as I pull it up and hold it by its roots. Farewell, I remember when you were just a seed!

The longer I garden, the more comfort I take in the ritual of going through the entire life cycle each year. I adore picking out seeds in the fall to plant in the spring. My grow light table in the basement has gotten bigger and bigger because having those tiny green babies means so much in March and early April, when the winter here in Minnesota has just gotten so long that I may go berserk if some tiny waft of a spring breeze doesn’t blow through, some tiny green weed doesn’t poke up under the snow. Tucking those seedlings into the May earth has all of the drama of sending my kid off to kindergarten, tucking tiny invisible notes into their invisible lunch boxes as I plant them. And then cheering for them in summer’s fullness as they grow up and begin to live out their life’s purpose—as zinnias’ shiny red petals glow in the sunlight, as basil or cilantro graces my table. And then, Minnesota fall means that all growing, all producing of food or flower, will cease for another long winter.

The more years I participate in this cycle, the more I love the dramatic resurrection stories so many of my plants tell me. Some are, simply, perennials, and I know as I cut them to the ground that they’ll bounce back in the spring, shiny green and new again. Others are busy throwing their seeds around the yard, winking at me and saying I’ll be impressed by their progeny. Other annuals are simply done, with no tales of regret to whisper in my ear as I say good-bye to them. All are amazing role models in giving it all away, in surrender, in generosity.

Some people believe that we’re perennials, that after our deaths, our souls reside eternally in one place or another. Some say we’ll be back, though perhaps in a different form. Whatever is and will be, I live my life as if I’m an annual—acting as if, if some part of me is to survive, it will be in the growth of the seeds I have sown in my lifetime.

With the help of wind, and birds, the exact location of the seeds which grow is unpredictable. Similarly, I don’t know which of the seeds I’ve sown will continue to bear their own seeds and keep growing after I’m gone. Given what I’ve seen in my life so far, my only prediction is that what of me keeps growing after I’m dead will be nothing I would ever predict.

My own mother, dead eleven years, increasingly comes back in memories that make me giggle. She wasn’t excessively funny when she was alive, but the memories of her humor are the ones that keep whispering in my ear now. Silly things she said forty years ago at dinner make me laugh out loud. This time of year she has more to say, I notice, as do other beloved ghosts. The pagans say that this is the time of year when the veil is thinnest between life and death, and in the garden, I feel that thinning all around me.

I don’t believe in a heaven in the sky, where St. Peter welcomes some and turns others away. But this time of year, in my garden, as the crows shout, squirrels scurry around, and geese fly over and honk their farewells, in the sweet grief of letting go and saying goodbye, I touch a tiny bit of heaven on earth.

I’m a gardener in the upper Midwest, so in July I spend a lot of time pulling up weeds. Just yesterday, along with a lot of other stuff, I probably pulled up a couple of hundred tiny maple trees, growing from the ‘helicopter blades’ that spin to the ground from my neighbor’s maple each spring.

The first year that I saw these sprouting in my yard, I panicked. I think I envisioned our yard suddenly and abruptly turning into a dense maple forest. I paid my kid a nickel each to pull them up; in the course of the summer I shelled out $100!!! Duly sorted in tiny groups of 20 as she collected her bounty whenever she needed spending money.

Now I know that, unless I ignore them for five or six years, these little maples are the least of my worries. Sure, six or seven of them might implant themselves right next to the tomato plant, but a swift yank and they’re gone forever! Nope, the weeds that drive me crazy are much less dramatic, much more insidious, will never turn into trees but will simply plague me in their short green ubiquity. “We’re here, we’re green, get over it!” they seem to taunt me.

The tough weeds, the ones that I will spend my life pulling and re-pulling, never successfully, are the ones that spread underground, in their root system. Crabgrass. Bishop’s weed. Jerusalem Artichokes. (Bear in mind that a weed is just a plant in a place where you don’t want it! In some parts of the world, orchids are weeds!)

This year a friend took a turn at the horseradish plant I’ve hacked at every spring. “I think I got it all!” she declared enthusiastically. I just smiled and thanked her, confident because of past experience that she had not. Sure enough, though it’s gone from the area she dug—a huge four foot excavation—it’s now reappeared five feet away, in the middle of the strawberry patch. Root systems are invisible on the surface, and thus incredibly hard to eliminate.

Interestingly, pulling weeds yesterday led me to think about racism, and what’s going on in the US right now. Hundreds of hours of media attention have been given to the racist utterings of Paula Deen. Indeed, in our media, this story is the central narrative describing racism. From my view, Deen is a maple tree. Her racist practices, weedy as they may be, are isolated, have their own root system, can easily be plucked out. One second; yank; it’s over.

The racism that is harder to see, and harder to talk about, is spreading underground, evidence of its existence popping into view here and there without seeming connection, much harder to identify and eradicate. That’s the effects of the US Supreme Court eliminating the Voting Rights Act, which as far as I can tell is garnering no mainstream media coverage at all. Already in at least seven places, changes have been made to voting that will drastically affect people of color, and all of us, far more than the epitaphs of a random chef. And yet, I don’t even know the names of the people who are enacting these new ways of doing things. I’m not seeing interviews in mainstream media with them, or with the people affected by their decisions.

The problem with oppression is that so much of how it spreads and lives is invisible. It’s not about individual bigotry or what names individual people call each other. It’s about systems, connections of one thing to another that may not, on the surface of things, appear to come from the same roots.

That’s what I was thinking about while I was pulling up the weeds yesterday, anyway.

Horseradish, flourishing in the strawberry patch