Building Resilience

at The Garden’s Edge

by Rebecca Cutter

August 15, 2019

Recently I had the opportunity to write and deliver a sermon for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Canton, NY. It was truly and wonderful experience and I hope you will enjoy reading it. I would like to begin by giving gratitude to the Akwesasne Mohawk, the first peoples of this beautiful land where we are now. Please rise as you are able, to acknowledge the four directions.

Let us start by facing east. East is depicted by the color red, it is the rising sun, the future. As we turn to the west we greet our ancestors, this direction is governed by blue corn and the black of night, it is our place of rest. Now we turn to the South, depicted by the color yellow, The south represents the food we grow, and abundance. And as we turn to the North we acknowledge today’s day sign in the Mayan Calendar: Noj’.

Noj’ transforms knowledge into wisdom. It governs the mind, learning, and memory. It’s often depicted as the white clouds and the white corn.

Please take your seat.

Through ceremony, I have learned to honor the four directions and the elements. In Guatemala, we pray to the creator and in this way, we form a cross, not a cross of pain and sacrifice but a cross of equilibrium, one that reminds us that we are all of these things at once interconnected and interdependent. My relationship to Guatemala, which began 23 years ago when I traveled there as a volunteer, fell in love and started a family, has taught me many things about, colonialism, geopolitics, and conflict. It has also taught me about growing food, about spirituality, and about community. The Mayan people have shown me what it means to be resilient.

One powerful example of resilience, are the brave individuals who risk their lives crossing the border in order to support their families back home and the people here among us who give them refuge. Immigrant refugees from Guatemala leave behind their families, their rivers and mountains, their land, and their sacred tortilla. It is not the rugged individualism of Western civilization that has prompted them to live abroad. No, it’s the deep commitment to one’s people, to one’s land, the invisible hand of market economies, and the impacts of climate change that brings them here.

In the Popol Vuh, the sacred text of the Maya, we learn that the Mayan people were formed by their creator, Heart of the Sky and Heart of the Earth, out of corn. To this day, corn is the staple of their diet and what nourishes their body and soul.

In the US we subsidize the production of corn, and its derivatives have found their way into almost all processed foods and many industrial products. Our government, in the name of foreign aid and food security, dumps this excess corn on countries like Guatemala. They dump it on the very people whose creator shaped them from this sacred grain and the market for native corn plummets, disrupting the local economy. The genetically modified corn from the US can’t be replanted without gross amounts of chemical inputs and when it is grown it cross-pollinates with native varieties, creating dependence on seed companies, fertilizers, and pesticides. It erodes the genetic diversity of native corn, climate adaptable resilient seeds, that are thousands of years old. It erodes the spirit.

Treating corn as a commodity, genetically modify it, and packaging those sacred beings, their ancestors, with chemicals that poison the elements, is a sacrilege.

As hundreds of thousands of Central Americans migrate north, risking everything to provide for their families, or to escape persecution, there are some in our country who demonize them. But, we do not! We hold them in our hearts, we house them in our homes, we honor their spiritual connection to the land, and we look to them for inspiration as we seek our own strength.

In my life’s work, I’ve seen a shift from “sustainable development,” the idea that we develop systems that can sustain themselves, to “regenerative development”. If conventional development draws a distinction between lesser developed countries (the subjects of development) and developed countries, are we to assume that the goal was for these lesser developed countries to one day live like us? There’s simply no way the Earth could sustain a world of people living as we do. That cannot be the goal.

So who will teach us how to live closer to the Earth?

Eventually, the word “regenerative” entered the development lexicon. It describes a process that restores, renews and revitalizes. Through whole systems thinking, we integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature, producing more soil, more food, more clean water, and more energy. This is what we are trying to do through Permaculture, which is a set of design principles that directly utilize the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems, and at The Garden’s Edge, the organization where I now work.

As we brace ourselves for the next extreme weather event, and for the quick erosion of our democracy, the word “resilience” is starting to resonate with many of us. Resilience can be seen as our ability to withstand stress, and our capacity to rebound.

I’m going to share with you three ways in which The Garden’s Edge is building resilience in Guatemala and how we are bringing that message home.

The ancient Mayan civilization is famous for many things, they were keen astronomers, bio-pharmacologists, and mathematicians. They are one of the few ancient civilizations that invented the zero which, in Mayan Cosmology, represents the life force, the origin of everything and it is depicted as a seed.

When we feel lost, we go back to the beginning, to the seeds that sustain all life.

First, seed saving gives us a direct connection to our ancestors. Every seed tells a story, its origin, the soils that it grew in, the people who cultivated it, the recipes passed down from generation to generation. The cycles of floods and droughts made that seed ever stronger, adaptable, resilient. At The Garden’s Edge, we rematriate these resilient, heritage seeds by growing them out and returning them to their original people. The resilience of these ancient seeds is a reflection of the people who carefully selected them, who shared them, and who planted them for thousands of years.

Each year we bring a delegation of Mayans from Guatemala to participate in what we call Seed Travels. Seed Travels defies common definition. It’s not a program and it’s not a project. It is a nonlinear work that allows new initiatives to emerge. From our indigenous partners, we are learning to rethink development. Seed Travels, is in fact, an old way of seeing, of connecting and of being. It is a movement that has no limits. As we say in Permaculture, the only limitation is our own imagination.

Each year, our Guatemalan partners travel the old trade routes from Guatemala to the urban gardens of LA where we work with immigrants who have been separated from their ancestral land and with second-generation Latinos who’ve never visited their homelands and together we plant gardens. Through Seed Travels, our Guatemalan partners meet immigrants from all over the world to share their seed stories, and their stories of immigration. Then we travel to Arizona and New Mexico where we harvest and clean seeds while sharing the traditional ecological knowledge of the Maya and the Pueblo people. Together we share our stories of resilience and we heal.

Amaranth is at the heart of Seed Travels and it’s a strong symbol of resilience. This ancient grain is sacred to the Maya and the Aztec people who have been cultivating it for centuries. During the first wave of colonization, the Spanish saw how this powerful plant nourished the people and how they worshiped it. Their fields of Amaranth were burned and the people were prohibited from growing it but the Amaranth persisted, and today in the areas of Guatemala and the American Southwest where we work you can see once again, fields of flowering Amaranth in gold, green and red. It comes up in the cracks of the sidewalks too. Many of us are familiar with this plant, it disguises itself as an ornamental in our gardens, but don’t be fooled! This is a sacred plant, a super-food that will help us survive in the most uncertain times.

In August of 2020, Seed Travels will come to the Haudenosaunee territory in New York State to plant Amaranth and to continue this powerful work. That is in fact why I am here today, to plant a seed.

We also work with traditional healers. The Traditional Healing Arts has helped bring health and well-being to communities for thousands of years. These healers do not have degrees on pieces of paper, they have complex knowledge passed down through the generations. They are the midwives, bonesetters, and the spiritual guides, who lead ceremonies that heal us in body, mind, and spirit. Each year, through Seed Travels, we bring traditional healers from Guatemala to participate in a Curanderismo or Traditional Healer’s course at the University of New Mexico. It’s beautiful to see these leaders sharing their knowledge and learning from healers from all over the world.

I am sure that all of our ancestors once grew their own food, they were seed savers too and many of them were traditional healers. This experience, although it may feel very far away, is in our DNA.

Lastly, I’ll tell you about the Sand Dam we are building with the Community of Chixolop, Guatemala. This technology harvests rainwater and although it is essentially an infrastructure project, our approach pulls on the four elements.

The Sand Dam captures precious rainwater, slows it down and sinks it into the earth, replenishing the aquifer. Through soil conservation techniques implemented above the dam we prevent further erosion of the precious soil where trees are planted. It feeds the communities burning desire to restore what they call “vital liquido” water, the vital liquid of life. And as they reforest the micro-watershed above the sand dam, they take a deep breath and a sigh of relief knowing that these trees will provide them with the oxygen they need in every moment of every day.

The seeds are our ancestors and, in order to move forward, we must go back.

Walking Backwards

Every once in awhile I walk backwards

It’s my way of remembering

If I walk forward

I can tell you what it is to forget.

Humberto Ak’abal, a Maya K’iche’ Poet from Guatemala

Let us walk backward, back to the seed stories of our people. Through ceremony, we heal our hearts and our souls. We cry for the loss and we cry because we fear what the future holds for our children and our grandchildren.

In my childhood, I was blessed with the love of my family. However, I too, like so many millions more, was touched by hardship. My parents split up before I was one and my sister and I moved to Syracuse to live with our mom. When I was four, my mother was hospitalized for severe depression and my sister and I went to live with our father in Watertown. The All Souls UU church took us in, helped get me into daycare, gave us clothing, blankets, and support. Growing up in a single-parent home is not easy, there are things we go without but I have found that almost all adversity is met with unexpected opportunity, hidden blessings. In the summers, while my father was at work, the kids on my block ran in a pack and we took care of one another. That freedom to play unsupervised, I’m sure it contributed to my resilience. To think of the things we dared do as invincible children without the supervision of our parents! It wasn’t until years later that I recognized what a gift that was, to build the physical and mental capacity to be in this beautiful world without fear.

My mother once said to me in a moment of infinite wisdom, “Do not make the worst thing that ever happened to you the most important thing in your life.”  I would add to that, “pull strength from adversity.”

I have cried my tears, and at some point I discovered within myself, a well of love and empathy for the pain and suffering of us all, an umbilical cord that ties me back to Earth, where blood is spilled, where babies are born, where seeds are planted, where people carry on in laughter despite the atrocities of war and of economic policies that put profit over people.

We are the protagonists of our own stories and our woes are universal. We wear our scars like extravagant tattoos of butterflies on milkweed, sunsets, a swirling eddy in the river of life… but they can only be appreciated through the world that we so bravely paint.

Let us give thanks every day for our strength and courage.

Now we are facing unprecedented destruction of our beloved Earth. I know you are all suffering and I’m sure there is not one of us that hasn’t shed tears of despair for our Earth and those beings who live closest to it.

I’m afraid we are in for a ride that will challenge us all.

Don’t batten down the hatches of your soul. YES, we are angry and YES, we are sad. This destruction was not our choice, it’s the air we breathe, and the water we swim in and, like a tornado spinning out of control we are all struggling to slow it down, to rethink, to reimagine, to plant a seed.

This year I am growing for the very first time, the three sisters, corn, beans, squash and I am also growing Amaranth. As I tend to my garden the plants with their cycles of life are my teachers and they pull me away from technology, and out of my head.

My Garden, Ithaca NY

For many of us, growing a garden is an exercise in staying connected to the Earth and to our food. Nature is a meditation, it humbles us and it inspires us. Nature is tremendous.

If we work with nature we find our place, it’s when we work against nature we suffer grave consequences.

Be courageous and seek justice through the right action. Those are our Unitarian Universalist values. Although words are very important it is through our actions, our living faith, that we will heal ourselves and our planet.

Now I write grants and budgets, I generate invoices and add names and email addresses to spreadsheets and I translate stories of resilience.  I do what is necessary, I do what I can.

When I think of resilience, I think of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, the formerly enslaved Africans, and the Maya. At The Garden’s Edge, we hold them up and we honor them for their time has come to rise. Their example reminds us how to live in harmony with the Earth and with each other.

May we find within us the strength and courage to overcome adversity, to heal our wounds and come together to form one resilient community.