Marc Gasol Is One with Nature, in Search of the #GazpachoLife

With the offseason in full swing, Marc Gasol, the great Memphis Grizzlies center and friend to all, has put down the basketball and picked up that most ancient and sacred set of tools: the spade, the hoe, the bag of fertilizer, and the watering can. He strikes the ground, plants the seed, and steps back as time and energy coalesce and morph his work from buried seed to sprout, sprout to plant, plant to berry, cucumber, pepper.

On the basketball court, we see Gasol exploiting fractions of seconds to create plays, hoist three pointers, rotate to cut off drivers, and encourage his teammates with high-fives. In the space of mere seconds, the jump shot blossoms into the gentle swish, the underside of the net rustling, like a flower gently caressed by the wind. But on THIS court, this arena, the points cannot be scored in the space of mere fingersnaps: it takes time, patience.

As we see Marc kneel to the ground and harvest cukes into his little waist bag, we see that Gasol is not merely a basketball machine, his only psychic thrills coming from feasting off the adrenaline of the moment. Instead, we see that he is a man in full, seeking something more than the rush of the on-court victory, the sound of the slam, the bending rims of the dunk.

In pursuing the day to day, extensive experience of planting and nurturing one's own food—the ultimate delayed gratification in a society where food is, blessedly, easily available—Gasol is showing us that he embraces the full spectrum of human experience, the quick rush of the roaring crowd as important as the slow, lurching pleasure of watching the tomato of your dreams turn from green to red, setting it in a pot, slowly cooking it until it gives up its form, CHILLING that concoction nearly overnight, and devouring the fruits of your patient labor alongside a glass of barrel-aged white rioja and perhaps a slice of delicious, slow-cured serrano ham.

When he plunges his fingers into the dirt, Marc joins hundreds of gardeners and amateur horticulturists on that yearly, holy quest to seek the blessing of the sun, the ancient orb that gives us flowers, vegetables, and life itself and asks for nothing in return, the only act of true unselfishness in this crummy universe.

Some might suggest that Marc is expressing some kind of psychic duality, here, the fast and the slow, a man who expends energy for a living harvesting and consuming it on his off time. On a certain level, I think that's true. But if you look closely at two rivers colliding, you will see that, if observed deeply enough, the waters of both are actually working together in profound unity.

As you can see, here, Marc is gardening in that finest but most thoroughly neglected of excellent gardening clothes: The basketball short and the athletic sandal. The cultural norms of the garden would have most people wearing a pastel cargo, a croc. Marc approaches the soil like an outsider, here. Basketball shorts, nice and breezy, a pair of athletics sandals, and a handsome tank top, allow the Spaniard to really suck the whole of the sunshine into his arms, surprisingly well toned for the offseason.

Marc sees the process of basketball and the process of THE GARDEN not as opposing animals, or differing impulses. He sees through the cosmetic and psychic differences to the universal truth beneath: in each, you grow, you depend on the providence of luck and fate, you harness the nature of the world or the nature of your body. Truly, this moment is the oneness of all things on display. Let us consider it in this, the beginning of summer.