To Be of Service

Yesterday, we started harvesting peaches from our trees. The trees are positively loaded with hundreds of peaches. Many were taken in June and July by squirrels, but now that the fruit is sweetening, bees, birds, and chipmunks are also finding them.

We’re good with that. It’s part of the covenant of veganic gardening: some for others, some for us. As we picked peaches last night, we tip-toed around the bees that were feeding and hydrating themselves on the fresh peaches.

Long before I committed to the veganic method, I left the animals and insects in my gardens alone. I knew that the food I helped produce was not mine alone. I never understood gardeners who kill or inhibit non-human garden visitors, calling them ‘pests’. This is not in harmony. It flies against the mission of food gardening, which, I trust, is to nurture and sustain others as well as oneself. A mission to be of service.

As lovely as these many peaches are, we’ll soon tire of them. We’ll run out of friends and family to give them to. Our colleagues may be thrilled with the first free peaches, but will finally get their fill.

My husband and I bring the overflow of our garden veggies to the local food bank in summer, and last night, we decided that the town’s food bank could probably use a few hundred local peaches as well.

Food banks are a life-saving parachute for those who find themselves without money for food. But the food bank, by necessity, only offers canned, bottled, packaged, dried, and highly processed foods. In summer, gardeners have an opportunity to supplement that with fresh, organic produce, and every food gardener should give their surplus to others instead of letting it rot in the garden: that, to me, seems like an offense to everything that gardening is about.

We all come into this life with a prayer. We’re all here to live this prayer. It can take years of listening for it before we find our prayer, before we hone in on what it is we are to be service to, before we discover our part in this great harmony. The highest and best calling for any of us is to be of service. I believe very much that everyone’s unique prayer orbits around being of service to the Earth and its inhabitants.

What’s your prayer? Go on, be generous with yourself – pray big. Dream big. Shift forms completely. Trust that you’ll always be taken care of. Give away more than you keep, knowing that you’ll always, always be provided for. Live your prayer, even if a small part of it is something as modest as growing food and giving it to others.

I hope these peaches ripen nicely and are sweet and satisfying. I hope that the birds, bees, squirrels, and chipmunks all get their fill, so they can fatten up for the winter ahead. May our family and friends enjoy their share, and the people who visit the food bank feel the love as they bite into some delicious summer fruit.

I hope it brings them joy, and that they endeavor to pay it forward. It gives me tremendous pleasure to know that the food we’ve helped bring into existence feeds others. Food is medicine. Food is joy. Food is community. Growing food is a prayer.

Much love,

Barbie xo