Farm for Change

Rob Sean Wilson

Rob Sean Wilson has always dreamed of growing his own plants & flowers since first reading Thoreau’s Walden as a youth in Connecticut USA and later tending a little tomato patch and mulcher in Berkeley. Dwelling eventually in Santa Cruz on one acre by a watershed down to the ocean, he has been able to maintain a garden, a Mary grotto, California grape vines, and an array of over 300 plants and trees cultivated or wild from Angel Trumpet and Cherry trees to opium poppies, hemlock, olive & avocado trees, French and China roses. His ethos of gardening/farming has been deeply influenced by the Farm for Change worlding project and eco-ponds at Academia Sinica in Taipei, where he hopes one day to help out as a migrant farmer.

Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu

Website: ucsc.academia.edu/RobWilson

Photo and Poetic Gallery

Archer Garden

Poetically man dwells [on the earth].

─ Martin Heidegger

Ocean Poets Surfers

We make a dwelling in the evening air

in which being there together is enough.

─ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Water Color by Rob Wilson

Vast emptiness, nothing holy.

─ Dogen

Green Forest Road

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a huge tree, so that the birds of the air can come and lodge in its branches.

─ Matthew 13:31–32

Photo credit: Jane Yamashita

Summer Signs

(Water color by Rob Wilson)

The Sheaves

Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,

Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;

And as by some vast magic undivined

The world was turning slowly into gold.

Like nothing that was ever bought or sold

It waited there, the body and the mind;

And with a mighty meaning of a kind

That tells the more the more it is not told.

So in a land where all days are not fair,

Fair days went on till on another day

A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,

Shining and still, but not for long to stay—

As if a thousand girls with golden hair

Might rise from where they slept and go away.

─ Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Sheaves

─ van Gogh, Arles: View from the Wheat Fields

(1888)