Roots

Driving down the road trying to loosen my load the other day, I looked up at the hillside beside me, and thought a few seconds about hillsides. There are a lot of hills around here, where we live. There was ivy growing on that hill, helping it hold -- supporting the soil.

Here in hilly east Tennessee, trees and grass and vines and whatnot are necessary to holding the ground. Their roots go down and the soil stays put. I read a story in More magazine about a women whose parents had taken her to Haiti in her youth, while they were missionaries. The story was about her anger at being taken to Haiti as a teenager, away from her friends, and then her adult reflection and recovery from her anger, and her happy rediscovery of Haiti and her father's legacy. One thing that stuck with me was her father's work -- planting trees to keep the soil from eroding.

So where am I going with this? Roots. Community. I was thinking about how people do that same thing for their communities. I know I'm not the author of this idea by any means, but I have been spending a minute here and there thinking about it, and what it means in this town. In my hometown. Elsewhere.

When we have a sense of place; when we put down our roots and invest ourselves in where we live, we keep the soil from eroding.

Recently here, invested citizens banded together to drive out a business that was selling K2 and synthetic marijuana. Kids were dying because of ingesting this stuff -- shooting up bath salts and whatever other chemicals. I haven't really read the whole history of this affair, and I haven't examined all sides of the moral implications of goings-on, which got ugly (but maybe they had to?). But people in Kingsport, and the local police, cared enough to step in. They said: Our kids are killing themselves. You have to leave. And the business closed.

There are other things. The garden. Time and again in my involvement with Harvest of Hope, I'm able to see and talk to people with an investment. With roots here. People who care. And I can watch them holding up their own patch of ground, supporting the soil of our community. And it's good.

Other places, I read about people having to pull up their roots. Being priced out of their farms or their houses or their jobs or their beekeeping operations -- and that's not right.

Not sure where this monologue ends up, but think about it. Your roots, and you as roots. What your digging deep supports, just by you being there, and being who you are.

And then, if you feel so compelled, come set down some roots in our garden!

Happy day!