Garden of Joy and Grief
“Ours is a waiting world. But what will we grow in the emptiness? What will we cultivate with the moments and resources given to us? I want to grow a living hope. Something as vivid and as alive as a bed of flowers. I want to create something that shows the way. A signpost of the good things God has planned for us and our world. Like an arrow planted in the very place where we anticipate a fountain.” ~Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky
The garden is a place of delight, I thought wistfully this past spring. I sat on my front porch, studying my land, imagining flowers, fruits, and vegetables into being. It was the best kind of pleasure of nothing—sweetness that filled my mind and heart as I gazed outward from my rocking chair.
I had images of a paradise of growing things—a bed of lavender here, rows of blackberries there. In the raised bed, ripe tomatoes that would be complimented by full green leaves of basil growing in my plot of herbs. In the shady spot by the cherry tree, I saw Lenten roses decorating the ground surrounding my bird bath and wind chimes.
In the sweetness of pausing to be present, I imagined a great unfolding of beauty I could look out upon, walk among, feast upon. What I didn’t imagine was all the grief, the stripping and pruning of my own hubris, the up close and personal failure of expectation and hard work, the heartache of loss and anxiety of so little control.
I already know these feelings. I am a parent of two teenagers, after all. It’s the same as with any creation, I am realizing. There is no joy unmeasured by grief. While I’d like there to be more admiration than participation, that is not turning out to be the balance of time and energy I am learning.
The raised bed that was an empty tomb just 3 months ago is now bursting with tomato plants that are taller than I, ripe and ripening Brandywines, Purple Cherokees, Sun-golds dangling from long green arms. Yet, I nearly lost much of the crop to all of the non producing stems and arms and leaves sucking the strength from the flowers and fruit and helping to create bottom-end rot, a name that makes me chuckle more than the actual rotted tomatoes do. It was nice to plant and watch and wait, but these tomatoes needed my participation and discernment, I realized. The gardener must also know how to cut away, to let go, to release that which is only consuming the life of goodness.
Of course it’s a metaphor for the whole of life. Have you ever seen those nonproducing parts? They’re bright green, deceptively lively in appearance. Why on earth would one cut away something so full and alive? But cut away I must. The garden seems to be teaching me that sometimes the fuller something is, the more sucked dry it becomes.
So one morning I stood, breathed in the delightful smell of tomato plants (a longtime favorite of all time smells), and began pruning, somewhat ruthlessly. Bottom leaves and branches, non producing upper leaves and branches, places that looked diseased, fruit with bottom-end rot. I stood, sweaty and covered in mosquito bites, and took it all in—the smell of trimmed vines, the tidy look of the plants, the healthy fruit a lot more visible. It was gratifying in the end.
Then, as I paused to contemplate, I turned and was reminded of the flowerbed behind me. There among the roses and lavender and peonies was what I thought was my ultimate nemesis—a binding and winding, tough grass that seemed only to get stronger the more I pulled at it. The extraction seemed to spread it further. I sighed. More participation, more grief.
This would not be the biggest nemesis faced thus far, however. Just as I reached the end of the plot, where one of my favorite additions, the butterfly bush, has this year grown taller than I, I realized the dying arborvitae wasn’t rotting away or drying out as I’d suspected. It was being consumed. Alone in the early morning sun, I heard the faintest sound of movement like a nail file being slid across a counter surface. The pods I’d thought were part of the bush were alive. Thousands of bagworms filled the bush and, worse yet, were making their way onto my butterfly bush, hydrangea, and lavender. They were even covering the lamppost and ground surrounding it all.
A google search on what this predator was, and my anxiety shot through the roof. What could I do? I imagined losing every plant I’d carefully placed and tended. I imagined pesticides destroying the health of my ecosystem and family. I imagined the bagworms casting their silky threads over my entire body and covering me from head to foot as I attempted to eradicate them—a very Indian Jones-like movie scene unfolding in my mind.
What place is there a more complete picture of the complexity of life than in the garden? Joy and sorrow, delight and grief, sweat, tears, smiles, abundance, creation and destruction, producer and consumer, life and death—the gamut all laid out before me. I fully in it—affected and affecting. I am cause and effect, admirer and participator, worker and worked over.
The grass grows on. The arborvitae has become a casualty of nature’s dominating force. I spent hours over days plucking bagworms from my remaining ornamentals and dropping them into a bucket of soapy water. Exhausted and dirty, I paused to witness, and as I did, a butterfly landed on my foot and refused to leave.
Purifoy writes, “These…are eternal weeds. Though unique in their methods…together they dissolve in my mind into a single, archetypal Weed with a capital W. They are my constant garden companions. They are my nemesis, and as such, they are the very things that give a form and a direction to my work. What would gardening be without them?”
Perhaps again it’s metaphor. What good is the work if it’s not pushing against something or forcing me to learn to commune with another thing, reminding me of my place in the scheme of things, how little attachment I must have? I know only that as I stand in the midst of it, I find myself feeling smaller and smaller, until the world around me is bigger than I ever imagined.
So, then, I pause once more to feast on sun-ripened tomatoes, so sweet and rich with flavor I can hardly describe the juicy, bursting delight of it all. I waited and prayed and worked those fruits into being. And for a moment, that flavor, the sweetness, is all the garden is.
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