Farm - 2022

Between hubris and humility, the garden materializes like a spectral manifestation. My father's excavator rends through ancient woodland while I stand witness, complicit in silence. The paradox stings: pastoral ideologies bulldozed alongside mycorrhizal networks that once pulsed beneath surface. Topsoil arrives as foreign transplant the archaeology of settler inheritance made manifest.

I hadn't anticipated becoming the colonizer I critiqued. Now I genuflect in manufactured dirt, whispering contrition. My hands work compost into compression zones, introduce vermiculture as offerings, spread desiccated flora as medicine. The chef in me had failed to honor the choreography already present in the forest floor's sublime decay.

Summer unfolds between remorse and possibility. Tomato vines somehow forgive, pushing through disrupted earth with stubborn clemency. Their fruit tastes of both sweetness and culpability during late August harvest.

The garden teaches patience where ambition reigned. Soil rehabilitation happens in decades, not seasons. Each earthworm emerges as absolution; every mushroom whispers resilience. The land holds a vernacular. I'm beginning to comprehend reconciliation comes not from erasing transgressions but by bearing witness to what we've transformed.

Hearthstone

Film Shot By Lola

Blips of Beings