Various buzzing beings hover, nestle, caress, drink, rub, and hum with yum. There is a general bliss with the variety of flowers. Vegetable plants blooming, from grande winter squash and pumpkin flowers to delicate tomato blossoms to cilantro which is just a mass of white, fragrance, and pollinators. The holly hocks are visited and penetrated by different humming bird species through the day and by humming-bird moths day and night. So intimate.
Beans and peas are often the same color as the stem of the plant. Whether climbing or bush variety, both vegetables can be invisible to the eye. The best way to pick is with your fingers feeling inside the tangle. Upon sensing a bean or pea, one then feels the quality and maturity of the veggie: its length, plumpness, and general readiness. So intimate. Depending on the purpose of string beans, they are picked young and slender for stir-fry, medium length and sweet for pickling, longer for blanching and freezing, while the ones that escaped one’s fingers and glance are fat and several inches long, those are let go to seed.
Shelling beans are delicious cooked young as a string bean. Then, the whole patch is let go to full plumpness and length, let stand to the sun and wind (ground watered, of course), then in late October or early November -if one can dance- you lay all the vines with pods on an old sheet and stomp on it. Dancing breaks the dried, hard beans out of their now brittle pods. Winnow it on a windy day. Let the wind take the chaff as it is tossed in the air. Since my legs can’t dance anymore, I crush the pods into a big metal bowl with garden-gloved hands, then do a version of wind-winnowing. It’s all good. It works. So intimate.
Peas are similarly addressed. Snap peas are picked young and usually don’t even make it to the basket, let alone to the house. Peas for stir fry are picked when long and still flat, but they will grow into shelling peas like the kind frozen in the grocery store when let grow.
At some point the plants will start to yellow from the bottom which indicates a new cycle of intimacy. This one is inside the pod. The bean or pea is storing up its nutrients and sugars for the next generation. The outer pod starts to toughen, not palatable at all to eat. This deters many grazers in Nature – where all these plants come from. It deters human grazers, too. Now, an end of life cycle has begun – same as for us and our pets. The plant is no longer supple, our body does this, too. The plant starts to make new sounds: creaking and moaning with the wind and no longer balanced in itself. Squash plants, summer and winter types, really show this. They topple oddly with the wind; their groundedness no longer stable. Like us. So intimate.
Winter squashes and pumpkins have to be cured before brought in for cold storage. That’s an intimate moment for plant and the human being tending the garden. With the plant’s display of aging and fullness of growth achieved, the gardener cuts the fruit from the mother plant, leaving a stem on the fruit. One notices the universality of umbilical cord in the whole process, an umbilical cord that one has watched feed this baby and make more babies through the season. The stem is left not to be a handle, which probably most people think, but for the same reason that a newborn’s umbilical cord is left with a stem and why mammal mothers don’t remove/chew their newborn’s dangling cord. The pumpkin and the baby have to seal this severing with their biochemistry. Inside the stem, intimately, a capping of life force is going on. Final sugars are congealing in the stem and hardening which signals the outer shell of the winter squash to do the same. For infants and mammal babies something similar is happening. It’s a hardening, in that, nourishment and protection now are an external process.
The pumpkins and squashes harden off in the field or garden bed for several days, then are ready for long term storage. Their life cycle is complete; now they nourish life for others. Be mindful of frost. Frost interacts with the sugar-water which is like unto the water ubiquitous through our bodies. You’ll need to eat those pumpkins right away; they won’t store. It’s all so intimate!
It’s interesting and amazing, isn’t it: the simple action of placing our hand on our heart brings forward gentleness, openness, empathetic resonance and response, and groundedness. We center, our mind soothes and calms. Endorphins that support our whole physical being start to circulate through our physical body, including the vagus nerve and parasympathetic system, promoting well-being while reducing cortisol.
Then there are the contemplative and meditative possibilities that come with the simple action of placing our hand on our heart and holding it there for a few minutes.
