Zia Gallina

For me, the mountain on which I live, the animals and plants, the climate, the river and underground spring… actually the land and all it encompasses… this is also my community.

I think of the motto of the French revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité, but especially the word fraternity—which meant that everyone was united, everyone was together in the struggle. The best possible interactions with neighbors, or with the government, are predicated on the understanding that we are all in this together.

Though I am reforesting, I am also making a food forest, creating far less work for myself and more resiliency while the house, the gardens, the barns, the woods are becoming an integrated whole.

A self-sustaining forest ecosystem includes not just a mix of trees but the understory of smaller trees, shrubs and groundcover plants, the animals, the soil and its biota, and all the dead matter lying on the forest floor.

And so, I plant. I keep pounding the ground, accompanied by several jars of saved seeds… I am lifted from my lethargy by the promise of arugula, endive, radicchio, lettuce, chicory… and resilience.

But if we are to continue at all, we have only one choice—to give up the conqueror role; to return to living simply as a small part of an organic whole.