Tracing Foot Steps

Living and working as a university researcher, I have the opportunity to look back at old work and reflect on a path.  You know, it’s like taking a peek back in time to a point where things were different yet you are able to see the path laid out before you.  The process is like tracing foot steps.

At Virignia Tech, I was blessed with the experience of growing my own crop for experimentation and latter sharing and eating the vegetable.  I remember the fall broccoli heads pushing up slow and steady with cool nights and sunny days.  Finally, one night the temperature dropped below freezing for four nights in a row and our crop faced major frost damage.  I reflected on this experience in my first blog 4 year ago.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

How can one look at broccoli and ponder the complexity of global climate change? Well, in graduate school you can. The first photo (above) was taken around the same time last year, just before harvest. Beautiful, the dark green leaves and broccoli “flower” pushing up. Imagine this same plant, 10 weeks earlier was the size of your typical transplant, now with a 4 ft. wingspan 3ft. tall.

Now back to my point and the other photo (below). Just 10 days ago a beautiful south Appalachian autumn, typically with highs in the mid-60s and overnight lows in the mid-30s, was in full swing; perfect for growing fall broccoli. Well not this year, the very first frost of the year went down to the mid-20s! Any home gardener or farmer can tell you that no plant can acclimatize to such extremes. Notice the leaf damage and slow head development. Oh and by the way, yesterday and today’s highs were 39 degrees. Not much will grow under those conditions.

Now maybe I am just bitter because my Masters thesis is sitting in a field at the mercy of nature. Just imagine being a farmer anywhere in the world and having to subject your livelihood to such risk. Even my adviser, who was been growing vegetables in these parts for 30 plus years, said he has never seen such a change. I would take a weather narrative over any scientific data to suggest that the climate is in a state of flux.

For now, I can just wait hoping the temperatures will not dip into the teens. Maybe I can count on climate change to swing the temperatures back to the 60s so I can go in for the harvest and the ensuing feast.

This story followed a predictable course where we ultimately harvested the broccoli and wrote up a scientific paper for publication in an agriculture journal. The truth is amazing because tracing my foot steps I realize little changes as I imagined.  Today there is still nothing like growing your own vegetables, the climate is still just as complex and worth pondering and farmers undergo risk each and every day they produce food to feed a growing planet.  Yet, the experience holds the most ground and replicating experience draws you closer to a path.

For these reasons, it important to develop and share methodology with friends, family, colleagues and community.  Many also call the exchange of information, simply, teaching.  My spiritual teacher, Yogi Bhajan said.

If you want to learn something, read about it.
If you want to understand something, write about it.
If you want to master something, teach it.

For each reader who visits this blog, my hope is you will learn something by reading.  While learning you may want to understand at a deeper level, so I encourage to write out your thoughts by sharing a comment on this page or with a growing community on our Facebook page. If you find a compelling desire to master something in your life, then the greatest approach is to teach.

Tracing foot steps is a single part of the process of living now, then and into the future.  Little changes as you might hope it but, the prospect of permanence is merely fiction. As our future takes us to new places and into new challenges the ability to communicate how will help growth, foster relationships and build strong communities.  Being true to a path and committed to its course is one simple way to live a happy and prosperous life.