I am kneeling in the garden thinning carrots, pinky-finger tiny and faintly orange, and I am thinking of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness…”
Michael is in the garden bed next to me laying newspaper and mulch around wispy tomatoes, the air is cool and clear, and we’ll make it home in time to wash our lettuce and set the table for friends. I am living in Shihab Nye’s “possibilities / of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even of the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records…”
I am thinking of Mary Oliver’s words “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it,” and I am also thinking about the rest of her poem, “There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left…”
“Whole towns destroyed” and carrot tops and I am thinking about famine. Humanitarians guard the word carefully, because it commands a response and the need is so great in so many places and the dollars so limited that no one wants to be accused of crying wolf. Famine, technically, occurs when 20 percent or more of a region’s population faces extreme food shortages, acute malnutrition exceeds 30 percent, and two out of 1,000 people die of starvation every day (can you imagine). Currently, parts of South Sudan, Somalia, and Burkina Faso are approaching this designation.
Have you ever seen a child with acute malnutrition? Their hair thins and their bellies swell. They grow slow and languid, as no child should. I train the hose on our seedlings and think about the rains that have failed over and over again in parts of the Horn of Africa. This dabbling in a community garden plot, this first coaxing of shoots and leaves from silty soil has shown me how much I take food for granted. Everything we eat is grown somewhere, under increasing duress—more pesticides, more water from shrinking aquifers, more miles between the packing and the eating. In supply chains we trust and keep on living.
“We Lived Happily During the War” writes Ilya Kaminsky, “and when they bombed other people’s houses, we / protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough. I was / in my bed, around my bed America / was falling…”
(Forgive me), I too am living happily. I love my new, little apartment with its big, sunny windows and the bread my husband bakes and our friends and our family and our jobs that connect us to the worst things happening in the world—which we can hold at a professional distance, protected as we are by the many layers of email chains and bureaucracy between us and anyone hurting.
“Joy was not made to be a crumb,” but “it is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness” when others don’t have this same stability, this same safe bed in which to bloom.
I am shaking stubborn weeds out of the soil and thinking about what it means to tend—how tending toward kindness, compassion, or justice requires the same steady labor as tending lettuce, or a child. In this moment, I welcome what feels like a feast of joy, happiness flowing “out of [me] / into everything [I] touch” and press my fingers into ground.
Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.
