16 March 2010
For the last couple Sundays, I have spent some time volunteering at Hayes Valley Farm, a new community farm project at the corner of Laguna and Oak. This was the site of the Central Freeway ramp before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The city zoned it for residential development, but it has remained a vacant, derelict, fenced-off block of ivy, trees, and pavement for the last twenty years. The site was recently activated for community use as a urban gardening education center, sponsored by the
San Francisco Parks Trust. Hayes Valley Farm is an interim project lasting two to five years, maybe longer, until the economy picks up and the city’s development plans are back on the table.
This week I was put on site beautification, which involved weeding and cleaning up the chain-link perimeter of the farm. As Hayes Valley Farm Project Director Chris Burley put it, we just want to keep the site clean and green, so that people will respect it. Cleanup involved tearing up ivy, thistle (ouch!), and other undesirables that had spilled over onto the sidewalk. It also meant picking up paper coffee cups, soda cans, beer bottles, syringes, bags of dog poop, and other signs of city life. A cigarette lighter. A dye packet from a hair coloring kit. The cut corner of a cereal bag. There’s something eerily post-apocalyptic about seeing these discarded pieces our lives incorporated into nature, tangled up in ivy, packed into mats of soil that have collected in gutters.
Currently, I'm living in the San Francisco Zen Center, just a block up the street, and as I picked up trash, I thought of American Zen icon Issan Dorsey. I recently read Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey, a wonderful book about someone who could, by all accounts, be considered a modern bodhissatva. Issan was a drag queen and junkie who became one of the original students of Shunryu Suzuki and, later, the founding teacher of the Hartford Street Zen Center. He also founded the Maitri hospice for AIDS patients. Throughout his life, he stayed close to the edges of mainstream society, and his caring presence touched everyone he met. His story is an inspiration, particularly for people seeking meaning in urban life. Biographer and student David Schneider writes:
Moving through his world, I don’t feel that order has been imposed rigidly, or in a clumsy attempt to make sense of things. He seems perfectly willing to go with your arrangement if you have one, or to let things shift as they do. Issan seems instead to be in love with the things around him, and to arrange them out of affection. He told me one about cleaning. ‘You don’t clean to make things clean, so much. You clean even if it’s not a mess. You just go around and make things look like somebody paid attention to them.’
Issan’s philosophy on cleaning has stuck with me, and it came to mind as I walked around the farm site, picking up cigarette butts, bits of glass, shreds of plastic bags. Waste management is an endless, and often thankless, task. There is always more trash, but it does us no good to dwell on that. And maybe it doesn’t help us to think of it as trash at all–such as the pile of torn cardboard that may have been used to pad someone’s sleeping bag, someone’s home. This debris could be incorporated into the sheet mulching project some other farm volunteers were working on just a few feet away. The scraps simply needed to find their place in the new site.
It is therapeutic to interact with an urban space in this way, especially when you have help. Some things I appreciate about farm work are the economy and creative engagement with resources, and the cooperative nature of the work. Bringing that sense of care to this abandoned lot feels like a way of reclaiming it from the city’s neglect, and clearing and blessing it for the life, groundwork, and joy that us soil-starved city folks will bring to it.
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