Prelude

There I was: mowing my front lawn for the first time in over a month, the shag carpet of seeding heads and weeds being shorn to reveal the thin dying stalks below. Not only had the lawn not been mowed for a month, but it had been watered hardly at all, and so earned the title of ugliest lawn on the block.

This I was fine with.

However, looking at my neighbor's lush, perfectly manicured turf I realized they must perceive my wife and I as uncaring and lazy, indeed in our culture it seems the appearance of one's lawn is an extension of the people who own it. But something was sickly backward in this equation: our lawn was ugly and dying because I did care. I cared about dumping chemical herbicides and fertilizers on the ground, I cared about wasting copious amounts of water maintaining something that has no business growing in the aired high plains of Colorado; but above all, I cared about the time I was expected to waste caring for a plant that I could not eat or use in any meaningful way.

I realized that a large percentage of homeowners didn't even care for their own lawns. They literally paid companies to come dump poison on their property and drive around on little tractors that spewed both noise and fumes, and they had expensive mechanical systems that woke up every morning to drain their bank accounts while spraying valuable water onto sidewalks and sod.  All of us living like hermit crabs – floating blankly above a homogeneous, disconnected landscape.

In a flash I saw this wasted mat of brown grass not as "my lawn," but as the little rectangle of planet earth that I called home – a gift of unfathomable beauty and potential. I realized that we all have the power to free our little pieces of earth from the oppressiveness of our stupidity and live connected to this amazing planet from which our very lives spring.

Into my mind leapt the mantra, "food not lawns." I had heard this somewhere before, but now it was resounding through my ears over the roar of the lawn mower. Food! Not lawns!  Food! Not Lawns!

I decided right then and there to live the rest of my life differently. To be connected to the land I lived on surrounded by the amazingness of life.

Goodbye, lawn.