seeds

There is a scene in The Big Short are when the two young investors are sitting in Brad Pitt's kitchen talking about how to get rich and Pitt's character is telling them that he grew all the vegetables in their salad in his own garden.

And that they should invest in seeds. Good seeds, not that Monsanto shit.

And they, lovingly, call him psychotic.

Later on in the movie the same two young investors walk upstream into Lehman Brothers on the day it collapses.

They get to the trading floor, lean against the cubicles as a tower of Red Bull cans teeters behind them. One guy says "This isn't what I thought it would be like."'

"Why, what did you think we'd find?" his friend asks.

"Adults."

Brad Pitt's character knew there were no adults.

And when there are no adults running the show, what's a smart man do?

He was a high-power Wall Street Guy and now he sees to his home and his family and his community. He grows a garden. He learns skills. He builds community and teaches other people to grow gardens and encourages them to learn complimentary skills.

It's cliche that soldiers who no longer want to fight want to farm instead, but it's a cliche for a reason. I mean even Maximus wanted to return to his farm, with it's dirt as black as his wife's hair. But it's also real.

Even Diocletian found more solace and satisfaction in his cabbages than in ruling the known world.

Interesting that this instinct seems to kick in once you've seen either the inside or the edges. And then we all just converge on Wendell Berry's advice (from "Think Little" for our own reasons, but we take it regardless:

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.