Holding and Planting

During my free time, or when I need a break, or just the rhythm of work, quiet conversation, and laughter I participate in community activities. Planting rice one afternoon I photographed this girl. She, and her nearby relatives, are planting several varieties of rice in this hillside rice plot. It is used for three years before it is allowed to gradually grow back to secondary forest. Forty years later the land will be cleared and burned and planted again. Done traditionally, without an expanding population, and in a balance with other food sources, land can be cultivated like this sustainably. Outside pressures and the need for cash income can change this equation. One elder described the kind of knowledge that upland forest planting takes. In this community, there are still people who learned from their fathers and grandfathers how to taste the soil. During one excursion, to a nearby forest, however, I asked someone about this practice of planting the soil. This farmer burst out in laughter. He thought I was joking. I explained that some farmers taste the soil to determine moisture, acidity, and microclimate. I was speaking Bahasa and that was being translated into Dasun. But, even though words were lost through the messy translation, it was clear that this guy didn’t know what I was talking about. At first he thought this was some kind of a big joke. It got worse when I demonstrated how people taste soil. And then things got out of hand, my translators were rolling on the ground. At first I tried to be serious. But that was working. So I went with the moment. I said, “It tastes crunchy. Kind of like corn.” And at that point even I began laughing. My laughing is loud and sometimes ridiculous. This laugh can cause entire rice fields of planters to start laughing. In this situation there are about two dozen adults and a dozen kids with us. The kids started imitating my laugh, echoing it back and forth to one another across the one hectare plot. Some kids were on tears in the ground; someone laughing so hard stumbled on the slope and fell a few meters. That caused more laughing and hooting. I had created some kind of upland planting riot! When the cacophony died down one farmer (just outside the image frame), spoke up. ‘It’s true,’ my translator told me, ‘we are forgetting how to do that. We are not taught that now. ‘ There wasn’t much to do but continue planting rice and talking. The sound of sticks making divits in the soil continued. One man and his daughter (pictured) tried to explain the importance of the soil to me. He started talking about things like temperature and seasons. He offered to show me the fifteen different varieties he had stored away in his forest hut, ready for planing. I felt my work quicken with his voice. I feel a kind of urgency. Forest knowledge (or any knowledge, really) is stable. It takes nurturing. And learning. It takes people who have the time to learn. It takes the assurance of having access to land and the confidence that you can pay for things, like schooling and health care. Isn’t this the balance that a lot of us struggle with?