There's a 36-year-old song that talks about the value of hard work.

"I gotta get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail," the chorus goes, "Learn how to use my hands, not just my head. I think myself into jail. Now, I know a refuge never grows from a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose. Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose."

I've been thinking a lot about farming lately, which is weird because the last time I tried to do any gardening, I pulled a random muscle in my back and limped for a week.

But work, real work, goes back in my family for generations.

My grandmother was a subsistence farmer in Greece, growing enough fruit and vegetables to keep her children from sinking into utter poverty while her husband flittered his time away in big-city coffee shops and with other women.

This was not a time or a place where divorce was an option, and even though she might have wished for some kind of decadent American lifestyle where his presence was unnecessary, she certainly was, at the very least, relieved when he returned to her, his wife.

If I'm ever tempted to wax poetic about farming, the ghost of my grandmother sits on my shoulder, threatening to punish me for glorifying what for her was no more than a sad fact: She worked the land because she had to.

When my father was born, she could not afford to stop toiling in the fields, so she wrapped him in cloth and hung the parcel on the branch of a tree, like food you're keeping away from bears. After my dad got too big to contain thusly, his elderly, half-blind grandfather was tasked with taking care of him.

When he was 2 years old, under only the lightest of supervision, he drank some water from a puddle on the side of the road, nearly dying from diphtheria as a result.

So, no, I don't fantasize about planting in the soil, in the sense that my grandmother did. I fantasize about planting in my life.

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, gave away $7 billion to charity last year. In a post talking about her donations, titled "We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For," she talks about what prompted some of her disbursements.

"It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college," she wrote. "It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year."

But she also talked, more eloquently and at greater length, about the generosity of others, the $470 billion Americans donated to charity in 2025, and the large and small nonmonetary boosts we give every day.

"The multiplier effect on the social value of every one of these forms of benevolent contribution is huge," she said.

In a way — one much less grueling than the path forced upon my grandmother but requiring equal devotion — Scott is a farmer, too, growing empathy and goodwill through the force of direct action. Unlike most philanthropists, she doesn't require the charities that are the recipients of her donations to account for how they spent the money she gives. What she puts out into the world is done freely, without expectation of reward or justification.

Though few of us have MacKenzie Scott's money, we all have the ability to give something (our time, our love, our forgiveness), freely, openly. We can all take part in building the human connections that sustain us in times of sorrow. And boy are we all living in a time of sorrow right now.

The title of Scott's essay reflects a Hopi prophecy that urges humanity to embrace its connections — with each other, with the land — and to turn back from greed and worship of technology.

"Know your garden," the Hopi prophet is alleged to have spoken. "It is time to speak your truth. Create your community. Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for your leader."

It's up to us to farm our own lives, to plant the seeds that we have in the earth that we own, with the time that we are given. A simple smile, a moment of grace — we can all afford that charity work.

If we do these things, if we all take responsibility for our own plots of land, the prophecy promises that we will stave off disaster. We will prevent our own destruction. All the materials we need, it turns out, are a hammer and a nail.

These are fables, yes, but as with all fairy tales, they're also plenty true.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Jonathan Kemper at Unsplash