Reach out, keep reaching out

The Seven Of Pentacles

...Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

Marge Piercy, 'In Praise of Fertile Land', edited by Claudia Mauro)