Planting potatoes

When I was a girl growing up we had several gardens around our old house. The largest one of all was used just for growing potatoes.

I can still remember those potatoes planting days. The whole family helped. After my Dad had tilled the soil, my Mom, sisters, and I went to work. It was my job to drop the seed in the soil while my Mom dropped handfuls of fertilizer beside them. My sister then covered them all with the freshly turned earth.

For months afterward I would glance over at the garden while I played outside and wonder what was going on underneath the ground. When the harvest time came I was amazed at the huge size of the potatoes my Dad pulled out of the soil. Those little seedlings had grown into bushels and bushels of sweet sustenance. They would be turned into meal after meal of baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, and my personal favorite: potatoes slowed cooked in spaghetti sauce. They would keep the entire family well fed throughout the whole year. It truly was a miracle to behold.

Thinking back on those special times makes me wonder how many other seeds I have planted in this life that have grown unseen in the hearts and minds of others. How many times has God used some little thing that I said or did to grow something beautiful? How many times has these little seedlings to provide another’s soul with sweet sustenance?

Every single day of our lives we step out into the garden of this world. Every single day we plant seeds that can grow into something wonderful. We may never see the growth that comes from the kind words or loving acts we share but God does. I hope then that you always tend the garden around you with care. I hope that you plant only goodness, peace, and compassion in the lives of everyone you meet. I hope that everyday you help miracles to grow.

Joe Mazzella

Introduction: A Mystery to Ourselves

'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man...

Sole the judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:

The glory, jest and riddle of the world!'

-Alexander Pope, 'An Essay on Man' (1734)

'Wonders are there many', observed the Greek dramatist Sophocles - 'but none more wonderful than Man.' And rightly so for man, as far as we can tell, is the sole witness of the splendours of the universe he inhabits - though consistently less impressed by his existence than would seem warranted.

'Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars,' observed St Augustine in the fifth century AD, 'and they pass by themselves without wondering.'

     The reasons for that lack of wonder at ourselves have changed over the centuries, but the most important still stands: the practicalities of our everyday lives are so simple and effortless as to seen unremarkable. We open our eyes on walking to be surrounded immediately by the shapes and colours, sounds, smells and movement of the world around us in the most vivid and exquisite detail. We feel hungry, and by some magical alchemy of which we know nothing, our bodies transform the food and drink before us into our flesh and blood. We open our mouths to speak and the words flow, a ceaseless babbling brook of thoughts and ideas and impressions. We reproduce our kind with ease and play no part in the transformation, in three short months, of the single fertilized egg into an embryo, no larger than a thumbnail, whose four thousand functioning parts include a beating heart the size of the letters on this page, and a couple of eyes the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. We attend to our children's needs, but effortlessly they grow inch by inch, year by year to adulthood, replacing along the way virtually every cell in their bodies, refashioning the skull, limbs and internal organs, while retaining the proportions of one part to another.

The moment one starts to reflect on any of these practicalities, their effortlessness does begin to seem rather astonishing, They clearly are not in the least bit simple - yet in reality they are almost the simplest thing we know. They appear simple because they have to be so: if our senses did not accurately capture the world around us, if our metabolism did not abstract and utilize every nutrient, if procreation was not almost too easy and the growth of children into adulthood not virtually automatic, if we had to consciously make an effort to speak a sentence - then 'we' would never have happened.

This should make us pause for a moment because, from common experience there is nothing more difficult and arduous than to make the complex appear simple - just as the concert pianist's seemingly effortless keyboard skills are grounded in years of toil and practice. So, it is precisely the effortlessness of our everyday lives that should command our attention - recognizing their semblance of simplicity as a mark of their profundity.

    But most people nowadays do 'pass by themselves without wondering'; though less justifiably so than in St Augustine's time, for we now know prodigiously more about the deep biological complexities that underpin those simplicities of our everyday lives. We should, by rights, be enormously more appreciative of nature's ingenuity, and the deceptive effortlessness of our seeing and talking and reproducing our kind should be part of common knowledge, a central theme of the school biology curriculum, promoting a sense of wonder in the young mind at the fact of its very existence.

Yet one could search a shelf full of biology text books in vain for the slightest hint of our lives. And why? Scientist do not 'do' wonder. Rather, for the past 150 years they have interpreted the world through the prism of supposing that there is nothing in principle that cannot be accounted for, where the unknown is merely waiting-to-be-known. And so, it has been till very recently, when two of the most ambitious scientist projects ever conceived have revealed, quite unexpectedly - and without anyone really noticing - that we are after all a mystery to ourselves.



- James Le Fanu
Why Us?