Category Archives: reflections

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showing up for salvation

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There is something about persisting.  Last Spring the vegetable garden looked beyond salvation.  But we persisted because we knew somewhere in the thicket of stinging nettles and various noxious growth lay our good intentions for eating loca-mindfully.  Notice that I didn’t call the rampant flora “weeds.”  I’m finding it harder and harder these days to use words that betray my blindness and my preferences.  Keeping the ever-spinning wheel of dependent arising in mind, how can I label something as not belonging when it has simply moved into the space I created by moving out.

Still, there were boxes that leaned more towards the nomadic type of plant life.  So this Spring we decided to let the two Western-most containers house various grasses and the occasional volunteer squash vine while we reclaimed – yet again – the others for tomatoes, lettuce, chard, chili peppers, and (something new!) eggplant.  It was an easy negotiation – much easier than the one I tend to have with myself about the boundaries between mental order and chaos.  And so far the pact is being honored, even after all the heavy rain and blistering heat which would make the mulch sprout.

I suppose there is little that is beyond salvation if we’re willing to dig deep enough, negotiate wisely enough, and allow enough time and space to focus on the essentials.  Most all, there is little that won’t change or rearrange with sufficient persistence.  Showing up each season, each day, each moment is all it takes.

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slumming in the garden of messy delights

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Each year I work away at one more hindrance by setting the intention to let it be.  Whatever “it” is, I leave it to be what it is going to be.  Well, more accurately, I set the intention to leave it to be.  What typically happens is that as “it” becomes more and more its own self, my need to cull, cut, contort, and otherwise connive it to be what I want it be asserts itself.  And nowhere it that more apparent than in my garden.

I’ve defined a new psychological disorder; if delusions are inexhaustible, so too are shrinkolexical categorizations of the impenetrable.  Gardener’s Obsession Circumscribed to Dirt – GOCD.  It is diagnosed by an uncontrollable urge to punctuate clusters of flowering plants with spaces of dirt.  It can be chronic or acute.  Typically, it is a low-level dysfunctionality (sort of like a dysthymia of gardening illusions) but can surge into a full-blown acute case in the months of July and August.  The more serious cases are found in August if one has a case of GOCD – vegetative type.

As you know I’ve spent two years away from my garden during its most formative and needy periods of development.  This might well give rise to another disorder – some sort of parental neglect of blooming potential or something.  Anyway, having left for the wilds of Santa Fe every March and August, I seem to have developed a slight tolerance for letting go of the garden I had planned to have and an acceptance of the one I do have – not unlike being a real parent of a real child.  No longer do I yearn (too much) for a neatly established garden with swathes of dark earth or mulch caressing the growth edges of Ox-Eye Daisies, Campanula, Pasque Flowers, Bleeding Hearts, and Bee Balm.  I am at one with the Azaleas with their twiggy branches and have left the Nishiki to skirmish with the kiwi vine for canopy space.  The Irises seem quite content with the Lupines and the Clematis are holding out against the Sandcherries.   Even the dreaded Peonies have re-asserted themselves quietly in the side beds.

This year, with no travel plans on the near or far horizon, I ironically find myself confronting my GOCD full on.  Where I thought there would be time to edit the garden beds, I find only time to edit out the unnecessary from the narrative of my lifeline.  And the most unnecessary at this moment is the illusion that anything can be picture perfect.  So, I am embracing my garden in its gardenness and slumming in the messy delight of its tangled growth.  Strangely, that messy English Garden I coveted for so many years seems to have manifested.  Perhaps it has only if you tilt your head a smidgen to the right which allows the echinacea to block the view of the weedy grass between the spirea and the honeysuckle.  But it is there.

Deeply embedded in the foliage and flowers, it is there.