SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — A drum circle throbbed with energy Sunday afternoon just off Park Boulevard and many could not help but stand and dance, slowly circling the drummers who were absorbing the sound like musical lightning rods and connecting it to the earth with their bare feet.
There is no better way to commemorate Earth Day, explained Woi Hiapsi, a member of Red Warrior, the local group singing Kiowa music to kick off the 32nd annual Multi-Cultural Earth Day celebration at Balboa Park’s WorldBeat Cultural Center.
“It represents the heartbeat of Mother Earth,” he said. “When we’re singing, we are praying and healing.”
Erin Brueland of Tierrasanta was one of those who could not stay seated Sunday.
“I was a little hesitant to get up and dance, you know, being a White person and not wanting to be disrespectful but, at the same time, I wanted to feel the vibrations and see what they felt like,” Brueland said.
The feeling, she said, was one of being drawn together.
“Sharing culture and food and music is such a binding experience, you learn so much just coming here,” she said.
And that binding went beyond shared music. Nearby, many visited a seed exchange. There was one packet, set aside from the rest, that organizer Dale Eblacas, called “DALETRON” by his friends, particularly cherished.
Dropped off earlier in the day, the packet’s hand-written label said it was “gete okosomin” — the name of an ancient variety of squash cultivated, according to University of Florida researchers, for an estimated 5,000 years by the Miami Nation of Indiana.
This particular variety produces squash that can measure 2 feet long. A since-debunked story said the plant re-emerged after 800-year-old seeds were discovered tucked inside a clay pot in a cave.
But, in this case, the seeds are precious for what they symbolize. Eblacas said they came from a local resident who picked up a few seedlings he sprouted and gave them away at an Earth Day event five or six years ago.
Getting some seeds back from that activity half a decade later, he said, shows the kind of culture that those who showed up Sunday hope can keep spreading in a world that has developed a dire vocabulary with phrases such as “food insecurity” and “food desert.”
A seed exchange, Eblacas explained, is about more than giving away free stuff. It’s about building community around sharing packets of natural magic that just needs a little water and a good chunk of dirt to deliver sustenance.
But it is the act of cultivation, the actual digging in the dirt, that is the movement. A gardening educator in local schools, Eblacas said that dirty hands change perspectives every day.
“When they get their hands dirty, they’re less apt to put chemicals onto their plants because they know it’s going to go right into their kitchen,” he said.
The 32nd annual Multi-Cultural Earth Day celebrationSunday’s event included composting demonstrations to show the best methods for building natural fertilizer, and volunteer Kacey Doner said that soil stewardship is increasingly the focus of environmental excitement.
“Our health, the health of our soil and the health of our planet are one and the same,” Doner said.
