winter in the garden

I was recently reminded of the old (Jamaican) saying “If yuh waah gud, yuh nouz afi ron.” My translation: "If you want something good, your nose will have to run." A popular U.S. equivalent would be "no pain, no gain" but that lacks flavor, as we shall see. 

There were more web pages explaining this saying than I expected. I chose this one because it was published this year, in a Jamaican newspaper, and perhaps has the most authentic spelling of them all. Here's a link--the article contains a few other Jamaican proverbs of note:  https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20250112/timeless-wisdom-significance-jamaican-proverbs.

I was in the garden because (technically) I was on a mission to gain some knowledge about gardening and composting from Mazorca Colectiva, a community of "immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, and individuals from the Global South focused on reclaiming ancestral memory and practices." To my credit :) I found Mazorca through a simple people search, not a Google search. I contacted several people I knew who were either native New Yorkers or who'd been living here a lot longer than I had. I asked them if they knew anybody who worked (or volunteered) in a field relating to the environment.

The answer is in the type of course I am taking. The title of the course is "Sweeping Changes in Humanity's Relationship with the Natural World." It is part of a graduate-level Certificate in Social Transformation. That's why. A significant part of the 'change' and 'transformation' called for in this program involves getting off the proverbial intellectual couch and engaging with people, and, most importantly, in this course, with nature in real life (IRL). 

My people search bore strange fruit, in a good way.  An in-law of a close friend told me that he had volunteered the previous year in a garden in Queens, just a short walk from his house.  He gave me a phone number for his contact in the garden. I also searched for the organisation online and liked what I saw. 

The garden work was sometimes quite strenuous. My first day I was turning over compost with a large gardening fork, and bending to pick out non-compostable materials. The decomposing soon-to-be-soil didn't smell too bad though, and having worked in a forensic lab in Jamaica, the creepy crawlies in the bin didn't bother me at all. At least they knew which way to run when they saw me coming. Later on I learned to harvest flowers and seeds from the tobacco plants in the garden. That was actually quite relaxing and the stretching entailed was great exercise.

On the day my nose ran, I also learned a new skill. How to use a power drill. We had cleared out the planters of all but the tobacco plants and planted some garlic. The next step was to remove the wooden frames that had been supporting the tomato vines.  They'd been cobbled together with screws. I worked with a fellow volunteer and a heavy drill. The drill bit was worn and kept slipping on the screws, many of which had been screwed down past the surface of the wood, so they were quite stubborn. 

Getting back to the "no pain, no gain" motif:  the association with working out, Jane Fonda, bodybuilding, and so on is what immediately comes to mind, but long before the 1980s, there was Sophocles, who wrote in his play Electra that "there's no success without pain".  If success implies change and growth, then sweeping changes of the kind needed to "change this world into a rose garden"   will probably require significant pain and loss (along with the gain).  Everything has a price. The only question before you begin might be, Is it worth it?