maize

I'm hoping to plant some corn when I return home, let it take root and become a way for us to enter into the connection between life and earth that is so explicit here.  Here, where every member of the family participates in bringing their own sustenance from the land - planting maize, shelling frijol, shooing chickens from the kitchen, grinding chili for soup, even the five year old who carries the corn masa on her head back from the mill to make tortillas for lunch.  There is a beautiful clarity of our dependence on the earth in this way of life, something that is easy to forget in the land of supermarkets and parking lots and prepackaged food.

It is not an easy way of life.  There is much that cannot be romanticized - constant labor, the potential for sickness or calamity to shatter the delicate balance of life, the inability to send your children to school .  There is a reason these communities who have historically grown maize and frijol and a few vegetables are eager for the chance to grow snow peas for the supermarkets of London, a reason they replace their plots of maize with coffee plants - "pista*" it is called, "cash."  When I ask them why they plant these crops, the answer is so obvious to the tellers - there are not many choices in how you will make your living here, no one asking you in grade one if you want to be a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer.  Export is a way out of the day-to-day subsistence they have endured for too many years.

So I leave with paradoxes - I who am so smitten with the local consumption of food, faced with the reality that export is the best option for a step out of poverty for these communities.  Yet these families continue to cultivate their own food sources, clear the fields from where their three meals a day are harvested.  I believe there is something to be learned in this, even as markets make our economic interdependence inevitable.  A posture of reverence for our dependence on the land, a humility to the earth as a partner in life, endowed also with the Image of God and essential to our living and working and waking.  May my life as I return to the corner of the earth I call home reflect this more every season...

*is this even how you spell this word? not a dictionary use...