Think about what you were into at this time last year. Now bounce back 10 years – what were the things that consumed you? Maybe you were a badass cellist. Maybe you spent your middle and high school years cooped up in your room, running scales until your brain shut off and your fingers and soul took the controls. Maybe you had a plan to join with a few friends and make a new kind of music involving a cello, a guitar, a djembe, and your roommate, who – you discovered late, late, late one night – is a badass beatboxer. Maybe you even got together two or three times and started to make some cool sounds before someone got a new job, and someone else found a boyfriend or girlfriend and disappeared, so you went back to the daily grind – wake up, work, eat, veg out, sleep. Still, those few nights you spent breaking your routine opened up a space inside you that has been gently calling in moments of quiet boredom.
Maybe you have an untapped aptitude for circuit boards. Somehow, though you have never spent much time on them, circuit boards make perfect sense to you. Or maybe you were hanging out in front of your fireplace this winter and realized that you can touch your heels to the back of your head … there are outlets for that. Cello worlds, circuit board worlds, and heels-to-head worlds, they are all out there.
Springtime is here. Winter may weave itself into the next few weeks, but it is mostly over. This is the perfect time to make decisions about how we spend our future. It is time to look at what we have before us – the return of warmth, another season of growth. Soon we will have buds, and soon after, the leaves. The world is about to turn green again. The peepers are about to sing. I am going to make a suggestion, as I do around this time every year. I suggest you grow at least one cannabis plant.
You can do it. It’s pretty easy – easier than raising a kitten, and way easier than a puppy. It is a very similar workload to keeping a goldfish (and the average lifespan is about the same). The recipe is just sun, soil, wind, and water. There are dozens of ways to bring those elements together, and creating your own combination is your first step down the road to a new version of you, which may become interested in topics like , , and the of cannabis plants in both their vegetative and flowering states. You will make decisions on whether to go with an . You’ll check your little baby plant every day, making adjustments to the angle the light hits so that it fully develops, and gauging the distance of the oscillating fan aimed at it, so it allows the stalk to grow without drying out the soil too quickly. You’ll pull off leaves, rip them up a bit, and drop them back at the roots to let them self-mulch.
The daily work can be done in as little as five or 10 minutes, but the whole experience will creep into places inside you that sympathize with the path we as a species have traveled, one that includes both ancient agricultural lifestyles and up-to-the-moment scientific advancements. It will connect you to nature. It will create a spark inside you that will eventually create an entirely new you. So, DGO, this is my pitch for 2018, my absolute best advice – get growing. You can thank me when it comes time to harvest.
Christopher Gallagher lives with his wife and their four dogs and two horses. Life is pretty darn good. Contact him at [email protected].
