I love to garden. It has become a passion of mine.
I love to look out of the window in the morning and see new, tender, translucent green shoots strain toward the strengthening Spring sunshine.
I love to plant seeds in moist black earth.
Dark as a tomb, and wait.
For tiny specks of leaf to find their way to the surface.
Curled and fragile.
Tenacious.
I scuff through the wilting pages of glossy gardening magazines, glancing over images of "low maintenance" gardens. Designs founded upon, concrete, clean lines, gravel, and chrome.
Minimalistic. Easily controllable.
I appreciate the work and design, the unfussy structures, the curves and contours. Reflections that meditate upon, punctuated space.
Indentations and pauses, order and sublimity.
My own garden is a slightly more "naturalistic" affair. A necessary unplanning of. And a few last minute ideas thrown together by. Scattered seeds. Into the dust.
I plant.
I watch,
I wait.
Clashing coloured petals fall and fade randomly. Daisies and buttercups freckle the grass. Wildflowers, mix with hybrids and even a vegetable sprout or two creeps in amongst them now and again.
Our lettuce crop did so well this year, I ended up planting half of the plants into the flowerbed. I just could not abandon them to the compost heap!
A place where my thought takes root. In the mulch...
And muted shoots grasp out beneath,
Clean lines, concrete and gravel.
Like thread veins,
Soft undone, green stitches, open the seams.
Emerge between.
The cracks in the slabs along my pathway.
Do we see our souls this way at times?
Something that we wish to keep low maintenance.
Do I look for an easy blueprint of a design. That I can manage without trouble. Keep clean without effort?
Around the edges,
Over the surfaces.
Along the borders.
Can I alone achieve a perfect design for my soul's garden ?
I try, I try.
To keep the corners swept and the pebbles in place. And the damp rot under old wood hidden from sight.
And life just keeps on growing from the rubble. Whatever is pruned back springs forth life.
Just like the house.
Where whitewashed walls stay clean just long enough for them to become the newly prepared canvas of a child's sticky masterpiece.
I am undone. By my own efforts.
The design cannot be mine.
My ideas of
Perfection , are not perfect in themselves. For they only lead back to myself.
A place of little perspective.
I have to give my craving for order and symmetry back to the source,
of Growth itself.
Alone, I am a stagnant pool.
Living water pours itself out,
moves,
channels through valleys,
erodes rock and stone,
cascades down mountainsides, filters through granite.
Until it eventually,
Returns to the sea.
Nothing that is alive remains a still life.
A perfect picture can only be completed by the hand of an artist.
And what it creates, is but a gift,
Nature moves forward.
It spills itself out and decomposes so that new life may grow, strong and healthy.
I am reminded of these words.
"And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."
As soon as one part of the garden in my soul is clear another emerges, more overgrown than before.
Like tides washing up more debris onto the shore than they sweep away.
So I notice the driftwood ebb against my soul.
Tilled over and over. The earth of our hearts. To reveal the roots of weeds at times, At times the roots of new Spring seedlings.
I spent close to an hour this afternoon propping up sunflowers, sweet peas and beans upon canes with bits of string.
Yet what props up my soul as it grows in search of light?
God's word,
the arm of a friend,
a little kindness along the way.
The Hope, of the seed,
The Faith, of the gardener,
The love, of the sun and the rain and the moist earth.
Providence.
My hands are discoloured from the work of the day. They have taken on the tinge of the earth. Green, musty, sooty.
The process of tending growth leaves it's mark on me.
Imperfect, Straining, grasping, straggly are the shoots, yes.
Yet still,
Somehow, still,
Growing.
Says it all.
