(Seemingly) Small Acts
What is Mine to Do? #3: Planting Seeds & Delivering Lettuce
It was a temperate March day, and I’d paused my hoeing of a garlic bed to listen to a voicemail someone had just left us on our farm line.
“Hi, I just wanted to call and thank you guys…I was at the food bank today and…your vegetables are awesome…I just wanted to say thank you…Thank you.”
Her words were simple, and by the end of the message it was almost impossible to understand what she was saying as she spoke through her tears, but my heart understood every syllable, and my own eyes filled.
Earlier that morning, I’d assembled bins of past-their-prime lettuce—perfectly good food that I would have happily eaten myself, but that wouldn’t have sold well—in preparation for my first drop at one of our local food banks. I’d spoken with one of the volunteers the day before, and she told me about how little produce they’d received lately. She said they’d be grateful for whatever we were willing to give.
When I arrived, truck bed full of lettuce bins, the volunteers greeted me with warmth and a kind of surprise that broke my heart. We stuffed the fridge with every head of lettuce we could fit, making sure there were enough for each family they serve on a weekly basis, and then we parted ways to our separate work; theirs to the distribution of food to the down trodden in our community, mine to planting seeds.
I find myself at war in my heart even writing about this, because I want to do the good without applause. This is a small thing, bringing lettuce that cannot be sold to a food bank. Minuscule, even. In a world full of such overwhelming needs, this feels like the absolute least that I can do. And yet I had seen it in the faces of the volunteers, and now had heard it in the words of the nameless woman who had left us a voicemail— this too-small thing was in fact, not small at all.
Last Saturday I planted cabbages—rows upon rows of healthy starts sat in trays, ready to go in the ground. Abundance. As I neared the end of the first bed and realized just how many extras we had, I began thinking again of the food banks that we deliver to (two of them now), and wondering if some of the folks there would like a plant start to plant in their own piece of earth.
Future grace, for hungry seasons—they need only a little tending.
And as I blistered my palm, carving holes in the earth, dropping plants in, tucking them safely beneath the warm soil, I heard the whisper: When you give it away, you’ll find there’s more than enough.
And isn’t that all (most of us) want? Enough?
Could this simple phrase be the answer to the fears that make us shove, and claw, and tear away from another human being what we think is ours? What we think we need?
The fear of scarcity is what destroys us, yet we all are walking around with something to give. We all have a gift to give. We all have some kind of abundance. I’m not talking about the abundance mindset that some in hustle culture use to talk about manifesting success in business: I’m talking about the hungry, yet hopeful, abundance mindset of the young boy with his loaves and fishes—can you see him there with his arms extended, his own stomach probably grumbling—giving all he had to Jesus and trusting that somehow what he had was enough for something. For a miracle.
A small act, done in great love. A gift his mother had given him, given away to someone else.
I’ve been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass recently, and though I haven’t quite finished it, I am absolutely adoring the way it turns my western perceptions on their head in the best way possible. In a chapter about wild strawberries, she spoke about growing up poor, but rarely feeling it. Every year her father would ask for a wild strawberry short cake for his birthday, and she and her siblings would run to the hill where they grew and pick them as his present. She spoke about her relationship with the earth, and how these strawberries were a gift you’d never dream of selling. They were themselves freely given from Mother Earth, and as such they should be freely given away.
Perhaps this is one of the great weaknesses of a capitalist economy—when living in a society where value is established by the question of whether you can trade that good or service for money, the wild beauty of things that can only ever be given for free is lost. As is the holiness of the wild world where so much bounty lies ripe for the tending and the taking. The stewardship care of the earth given to us, and the earth giving us her gifts in return. Reciprocity. As Kimmerer says, “all flourishing is mutual.”
I remember this as I graciously accept the fistfuls of dandelions from the small hands of my twin toddlers. At almost thirty-four years old I am joyfully discovering that they are not the weeds I was taught to believe they are, but rather, they are food. With their petals I will make dandelion wine, and the bitter greens will support healthy digestion when I eat them in a salad, and even the roots I can roast and grind for tea. To say nothing of their benefit to the pollinators upon which we all rely.
Who decided these were weeds and not wildflowers? Was it not a man behind a desk somewhere, who saw the prolific plants and realized they were too generous to ever have monetary value? Or better yet, that by demonizing these prolific plants as “weeds” that there was a tidy profit to be made on chemical sprays that promised to get rid of them? How many other pieces of knowledge have been lost to us because they were based, as Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches us, in the wild grace that is an economy of gift that our market economy has done its very best to erase?
I am not an economist, nor an anthropologist. But I am a farmer and a poet, and when I see connections I will share them. And when I wonder things, I share that too.
I still remember the horror I felt in my gut as a child when my father told me about how farmers are sometimes paid to burn their own crops in order to preserve the market price of something.
“But what about the hungry people Daddy? Couldn’t someone have done something good with all that extra food?”
I don’t know the answers to this, and I know there are no simple ones. But I do know that I don’t want my decision making about what is right and good to be driven by money. You can be a greedy person no matter how much money you make.
All I know, is that I’ll be damned if I let good food go to waste just because I can’t sell it. And I’m not going to throw out my perfectly good cabbage seedlings to preserve the price of a head of cabbage either. There is a value in this world that makes no sense to a capitalistic system.
Scarcity whispers; “If they get the plant for free from you, then maybe they won’t buy cabbage from you…and maybe that would be bad. Will there be enough? What about the mortgage? The water bill? The ice cream outing you want to make with the kids?”
But I don’t listen.
I choose not to listen.
Because I get to choose which voice I listen to, and there is another voice that whispers something quite the opposite.
“If they get the plant for free, maybe for the first time they’ll get their hands in the dirt. They’ll learn a new skill they can teach their children. They’ll spend time outside instead of in front of the TV. They’ll realize that we are all connected by the good gifts of the soil and the sun, and maybe they’ll have enough to share, and they too will get to participate in the exquisite joy that comes when you share what you’ve been given, because you trust that there is enough.”
The small act of lettuce delivered to a food bank made one woman feel so seen and cared for that she wept in gratitude. This is no isolated incident, I have stories like this too. Moments of kindness from a stranger on a plane when I was cradling a crying baby; a friend bringing me soup when I hadn’t slept in days; a small stuffed animal given to my daughter by a homeless man who wanted nothing more than to see a little girl smile.
Mere moments of interaction leading to a resurgence of strength, a restoration of hope, a burning in my gut to do what others have done for me time and time again.
I can’t fix the economy. I can’t stop dictators from doing what dictators do. I am not in the rooms where decisions that affect the poor are being made, and though I can call my representatives, there feels like little else I can do to affect the kind of change that the world needs. When I stare too long at the problems, I feel the paralysis kicking in, believing the lie that since I can’t do it all, there is nothing I can do.
I am only one person, and I cannot do everything—but I can do something.
I can’t fix the economy, but I can plant extra lettuce seeds.
I can’t feed the hungry all over the world, but I can help to feed the hungry in my midst.
It is mine to plant seeds; to water them, place them in the sun—but it is God who makes them grow. It is mine to deliver lettuces, and to plant an extra row in hopes of always having enough to give away.
It is mine to look around with eyes of gratitude for the absolute plenty I am surrounded with, even as I grieve the evil I see, and the moments I feel the sting of lack.
Mother Theresa told us to “do small things with great love.” And yet all our lives we’ve been tempted to believe the lie that small things are not enough.
Who gets to decide what is a weed or a wild flower? Who gets to call an act of great love, too small?
Perhaps there is no small act of love—because each and every act of caring for your neighbors in their moment of need is a drop of water in a lake—a ripple that will rustle the grains of sand at the edges of the lake, just as surely as a speed boat wake will.
You might not know the impact right away, or maybe even ever.
But who knows how far one (seemingly) small act will go?
I want this to be a community place of encouragement—if you feel so inclined I hope you leave a little comment sharing with us one small act of great love YOU are doing today to care for those around you. Or share a small act of love someone did FOR YOU that left a life-long impact. Let’s engage and encourage each other in what is ours to do.
And as always, thank you to all my subscribers for being here, engaging with what I share, sharing it with friends, and especially to my paid subscribers who help financially support my work here with their subscriptions. Paid posts will be returning in July, but don’t forget you can also support me by buying my books too. ;P
xoxo,
Gracie
This is the way. This is us.
I am only one person, and I cannot do everything—but I can do something. 👏👏👏