This past week I planted my spring greens. There is something about placing seeds in the ground. As though you the planter begin to swell with the same new life of the seeds: a new beginning, a new season. New life.
The ground yields up plants, which enable people to live. Not only to live, but to live pleasantly. Does Xenophon have in mind the crispness of a spinach leaf, the sweetness of peas, the tang of the vine-ripened tomato? Or does he have in mind a late-winter sowing—in recently snow-enriched soil, or a rosy-skied summer morning weeding with your children at your side? Or maybe he has in mind what the prophet Isaiah speaks of: eating the fruit of vines you yourself have planted (Is 65:21).
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