alternative futures: cherry tomato bodymemory

03 Jul 2017

i couldn’t believe how hot it was already. my pants were sagging so i stood up the tighten the piece of rope tied around my waist. as usual, i’d forgotten my belt. on a normal day, my pants would have held up until after lunch, but the sweat dripping down my back made my repeated attempts to pull them up useless.

it was late july and we were restringing our tomatoes in the field. it was still early in the day and our crew was still in high spirits. laughing and joking as per usual, we moved quickly from plant to plant, making sure the main stem was tightly held to a post with brown twine.

i bent down to pick up a few split sun gold tomatoes (my favorite) when i felt the black out swallow me. it was happening again.

all of a sudden, i was no longer in control of my body. i watched the hand grab the tomatoes, but it wasn’t the hand i recognized. i felt the tomatoes between fingers, but they weren’t my fingers. who’s body was i in this time and when?

i didn’t wonder about the where because the where was always the same. bodymemory can only be recalled in the place where it was created. so whoever’s body i was inhabiting for the moment must have worked this same field in the past.

my family had owned this land for two centuries so it could have been any number of ancestors i had to think through was large. but judging by the wedding band (no stone), the callused hands, and the shoes, i must have been a young dad in the 1950s. maybe my grandfather, albertus. maybe my greatgrandfather, james.

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this is post #3 of the evolutionary leadership 250 words a day challenge.

inspiration:

• the epigentics episode of on being

• during the ‘diversifying the field: stories from the front lines’ session of the 5th annual massachusetts urban farming conference, toussaint from gardening the community said something like:

  …sometimes you just find yourself singing or crying or being joyful - those are memories being recalled because of the connection to our ancestors who worked in the sun with soil…

words: 289