Mini-Inquiry Oct 9th: A Journey To My Garden

Something that is incredibly personal to me, is the act of cooking and is something that represents a journey into understanding of the person who is preparing a meal for you. So I present to you a gift from my garden and the first (and sometimes last) thing I think of when cooking: fresh herbs.

The story of my natural object (or should I say objects) starts before these future ingredients were even seeds in a package on a grocery store shelf. It starts with me finding that if you actually MAKE the food you’re about to eat, it kind of tastes better. Like you can taste the blood, sweat, and tears (all metaphorically speaking) you put into the food, and that hard work tastes great! I found this out early in life, however it didn’t really make an impact on me until I went to University. Here I really found the value of a good meal and the kind of community is built when you could sit around with your friends and have a home-cooked meal rather than eat at the cafeteria. From there it progressed with me getting more and more involved in food, and where my food comes from, which ultimately leads us here, to my herbs. Now imagine how good that food tastes when you yourself not only cooked it, but grew the ingredients yourself. That is a whole other realm of flavour and connectivity to your own values, heritage, and culture, whatever that may be.

From this I feel like there are many things to be learned from a simple bunch of plants. The patience it takes to grow, nurture, and ultimately harvest your own food has a certain virtue to it. Let me tell you that this is not my first attempt at growing things and the first….dozen attempts resulted in me standing and staring at a patch of bare earth thinking “what went wrong?” That in itself leads us to another thing that can be learned and that is perseverance. I have made dough many times and I am reminded of am old proverb (albeit modified for bakers):

“If at first is doesn’t rise, try and try again. ”

Looking at these next pictures, I am stricken by the level of complexity the bundle holds. The diversity of the stems and the leaves. The intricacy of the patterns on the leaves themselves. In this case, I looked at a close-up of a sage leaf and began to draw. For this sketching assignment, this was incredibly difficult at first, however as time went on and I continued to attempt to draw the detailed pattern on the leaf, my understanding of both the leaf and my drawing evolved. I experimented with different techniques, different ways of holding the pencils, differing movements and pressures, and through all this the drawing began to take on its own form and create its own questions.

How many individual leaves are in this entire bundle? What kind of leaf would have a pattern like the one I drew? If I were to zoom in, would a new pattern emerge?

And to me, all these questions encompass a part of what inquiry is. Through the exploration of a topic that is meaningful to you, you can find new meaning in what you see and then applying that new understanding. Excitement leads to investigation, investigation leads to questions, questions leads to answers, and answers lead back to excitement and yet more questions.