Gardening
“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.” -Leonard Nimoy
For Earth Day
Around the time I started working at home my wife and I bought our first house and with it, our first yard. We moved in at the start of fall and within a few weeks the added responsibility of a yard was apparent. My first time out raking leaves I elected to call the city, to make sure there wasn’t a yard bag limit, as I moved twenty-two bags to the curb for their Wednesday pick-up. Weeding, mowing, blowing, edging, raking, watering. The basic tasks to just maintain a yard can be quite consuming. I found that I enjoyed them. But not because of the tasks themselves or the result in the end (that “perfect” moment when all the leaves, weeds and plants are in their proper place). What I enjoyed was being at the edge of my world and the rest of the world.
Just as the presence of a person does not stop at their skin, so a home does not end at its walls. There is that space, just outside your door, that is both yours and not yours. The lawn that you maintain, and where the animals freely roam. The driveway where you park your car, and where the mail carrier walks to deliver packages. The tree that gives you shade, and the bird calls home. The yard provides an invitation to recognize those spaces and places where your small world collides with the larger world. And it is in this meeting that reality is born. The poet David Whyte, in an interview, talks about this. He notes that what you expect of the world will not come to pass, but that what the world expects of you will also not come to pass. What does come to pass is the conversation between the two.
Put another way, a garden is a space where your will meets the will of nature. Weeds you pull out come back again. Plants that you hope to grow never establish themselves and wither away. The hot summer sun scorches your grass no matter how much you water it. This, of course, does not only happen in gardening. I notice this trend while parenting all the time. I figure out my children’s sleep habits, and it changes. I discover they love a certain food, so I buy a bunch of it at the store, and they all of a sudden don’t care for it. I start singing songs they usually request and they abruptly say “Dad stop singing”. But time in the yard has taught me that these moments are not there to frustrate me, but are a chance to be thankful. To graciously accept that change and growth are going to happen without me, but that I will still be invited to participate. That my children are someones to be discovered, not somethings to be defined to fit my desires.
The same can be said of your internal world. You are filled with flowers and fruit and weeds and trees. You are a garden to be cared for. Do not get angry that the parts of you that you don’t like keep surfacing. Continue to pull what is present, hoping less will come back next time. Smell the fragrance that is the unique gift you offer to those around you, not forgetting the beauty it brings them. Bury the leaves that have fallen around you and grieve the bare scene they leave behind, trusting the Tree will endure the winter and they will return.
May you not be discouraged when your garden is disheveled, nor frustrated when your plans fail. Instead, may you see the world and your being as an unfolding that is asking you to not only bear witness, but to participate in its creation. May you care for yourself, as tenderly and as carefully as a master gardener would prune her plants. And may you always see that what does come to pass is a result of your work and the work of another.