The Powerful Sponge God

There's a god living in the garden. We call her the Sponge god (well, maybe just two volunteers).
So elegant and green she is.
multiplying with eagerness to exist on a vine for the earth to see.
The weeds in the garden are a million thoughts in our mind.
And they are hurdles that must become raging rivers unconfined.
They have a purpose you see. Mottainai they say, as you throw the weeds away.
Oh, how the Sponge god watches over us as we toil in the soil. Little do we know she is observing.
Waking up as the sun creeps on the horizon, the farmer can snip the eager life of buds from weeds we do not like,
only to make fermented plant juice from their existence,
for the health of our own intentional greens.
She puts me to work, harvesting each vegetable so that I am reminded what life is.
She reminds me that people in this world are fighting for a narrative change,
where capitalism will no longer exploit their lives in the rural world,
where patriarchy no longer is the center of their family unit,
where their community can embrace the truth that food security is not dependent on Monsanto,
where life can return to the soil...
She encourages me to have faith in Admissions, recruiting leaders of the marginalized.
The all mighty Sponge god hears the conversations we have about practical empowerment for communities.
She knows our mistakes, and seeks a way for us to see them.
She looks at the rural leaders as they sow, transplant, weed, harvest, and transform spiritually, practically, and socially minded for their communities and family.
But, when the day finishes, and as I take the hoe back to the shop, I realize what the Participants of this place had been saying this whole time,
"sponge gourd", but with an accent.

May we live intentionally with symbolic interaction, and a will to recognize the real tangible and systemic issues that keep lives severed from justice and with our own home- the biosphere.

Peace

Photo by Shige, ARI rice field