Reflection: Green Teen Community Garden Project

April Eighth. Two Thousand and Nine

In the Green Teen Community Garden, in their, in the works, Green house, I Helped my good friend Zenote with Green Teen Tenoya build a temperature regulator, swing open window. Tenoya is skinny, light as a feather, and likes building and architectural design. Her sole volunteering for this construction-nature of work over cleaning or gardening revealed her confidence in the defiance of societal gender norms. Right away it seems as if I had admired her for that. Zenote and I had her hammering, lifting, moving, and holding boards for us while we circular sawed them. She flowed so well with us. So cooperative and quiet, happily and genuinely interested. The clouds were dark and the weather was stormy. At one point it snowed snowflakes. Before I found gloves in the shed, my fingers became red frozen. Lengthily into the path of our project, Tenoya found her way into another garden project where constructively we observed her contributing, so we let her be and returned to work, to finish the window installation, and drill in green house structural frame supports. Within a short while, Zenote’s partner, Green Teen Coordinator, Bria White slyly asked us for our help to cut open a surprise birthday cake for our Green Teen Educator friend Robin. We lit up a double chocolate frosted with candles and song-ing for her, “Happy Birthday,” the Stevie Wonder version. We warmed her with hugs and positive vibrations. There was a true sense of love, happiness, and unity in the community when all this was happening. In need of a way to get Vassar, Zenote asked me if I could help him by riding with him to Vassar for the purposes of returning Bria’s Volvo wagon to the Family Partnerships Center. We shared a hemp waffle, avocado, coconut butter, and banana sandwich humoring about riding on bicycles locked into bike racks on top of cars. Zenote is a shining spirit. He genuinely thanked me for my help and presence. We hugged long before the fork on our path would have us traveling in different directions. Zenote left me with a feeling of true friendship, wanting to be nearer to him, especially through more Green Teen garden days. This project is a continuation of cultivating relationships whose seeds have been planted more than one year ago by now. I feel it is vitally, healthily, and meaningfully important to engage in projects and relations on the long-term rather than short-term level to allow for the various potential fruitions and blossoming to occur. Staying with Green Teen last spring, and in the summer at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, to this springtime again, I can feel the interwoven-ness of connections that have evolutionarily developed, and are ever evolving. Returning Bria’s ride to FPC, I ran her keys up three flights of endless marble stairs to meet her at the Green Teen office room. Bria and Robin always greet you with some of the biggest smiles that you had ever seen. They told me that there was one piece of chocolate, chocolate cake with my name on it if I would like. “Of course!” Indulging, it was delicious, “They treat you well here,” is what my mind-heart said. I cleaned up the dishes and composted the fruit peels from inside my backpack. Bria was off to make a vegetable-ly dinner for Robin, so I walked her downstairs on our way out. She told me how good it was that Zenote and I connected that day. “He’s out of work, and up and down all the time lately.” She mentioned his down transforming into an up when we essentially reunited with each other out there. Zenote greatly inspires me. He is a hardest working construction worker and he is a spiritual, folklore, cultural, singer guitar player performer. I have witnessed him carry exhaustive amounts of food from his far away house down to the river to cook dinner for us with, he has told me great stories of him walking alone at night through the wild great distances, and I have crossed paths with him on his knees on the New Paltz sidewalks playing Spanish guitar with soul-force energy as if it were our last day here on earth, with two pizza slices that he had gotten, one for me, and one for my love Ella, “Hey, Come stay, sit down, eat, listen,” welcoming us he would say. And now he is in need of work, with out work, and he is helping with his hands, heart, and head to build a community garden green house for assessable to all, fresh local food access. “Is this what people are going to start doing exponentially more often, when the jobs keep vanishing, corporations poisoning our Mother and us in our food, and the scam of loans->money creation out of thin air->inflation->debt->slavery comes to an end?” Scarcity over needed resources often means war in the greed driven chase to control over them, but at the same time a common coming together, to make a better livable world possible, is another possible, possibility. This is how I see the relevance in Green Teen. There are too many oil petroleum stocks at Wall Street at stake, so the media is silent, but we are deeply listening and we an hear Mother Earth and all her creatures. They are asking us to live differently, so we, are voluntarily, adopting the lifestyle practices, of living simply so that others may simply live.

-anthony