Don't Just Dig In: Building Your Community Tilth

We can only expect our own willpower to get us so far into any given project.  After that point, a combination of boredom, exhaustion and competing priorities will start to encroach on what was started with the best of intentions.  When it comes to connection, what this means is that we begin a book club, game night, or friendship planning on it continuing but over time, it just…peters out.  Instead of using our initial burst of motivation to create some amazingly enviable gathering, I’d like to propose that we pursue connection backwards.  We use our motivation to figure out all the boring parts first.  Then, when we get bored, we mix it up with the really fun things.

When I plant a garden, I always want to get right into putting seeds in the ground.  Isn’t that what it’s all about?  Hands in the dirt, the excitement of knowing that in just a few short weeks we’ll see seedlings?  This is why I have Forrest around.  Because if you do it my way, you get seedlings that grow a few inches and then wither because there is no soil nutrition, or bad drainage, or too much drainage.  In other words, he pays attention to tilth.  Tilth is such a fun word for me because as best as I can tell, it just means, “soil that can grow stuff.”  Sort of a “you know it when you see it” thing going on there.  I like it because it refers to some quantity of amorphous attributes that maybe someday I will be able to identify.  The other cool thing about tilth is that you can increase it.  It’s not good dirt or bad dirt.  It’s just got low or high tilth.  We can add in compost, or peat, or even things like coffee grounds to change the texture, acidity and nutrient mix in the dirt.   And you can always adjust after the seeds are in the ground.  Just ask my family who keep peeing on ground around the blueberry bushes to increase the soil acidity.  (I wanted to use vinegar but nope, my feral kids disagreed.)

There’s a tilth to building connections too.  When we commit to becoming a connection builder, we start building our tilth.  One part of that is self-care.  We need to make sure we’re connected to ourselves first.  Another part is making connection a habit.  Making things a habit is the process of making them so boring that they become part of the background.  Never forgotten, yet never needing to be remembered.