Two weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, the 50-something woman at the checkout line asked me, “So, do you have kids?” When I smiled and responded, “No,” she tried the next-obvious test of a woman’s nurturing instincts: “How ‘bout a dog?” “No,” I laughed, “I don’t have any pets either…just a lot of plants.” This week, the same check-out lady – who has the warmest smile with the loveliest wrinkles at the outer edges of her eyes – tried again: “So you don’t have any kids, still?” It’s like she was trying to recall if I was the same woman from two weeks ago, and at the same time, expressing her confoundment that a woman who looks to be between 35 and 40 and seems in reasonably good health, has somehow defied the inevitable fate of becoming a mother. Today I reminded her again of my many plants. “Why so many? What are you going to do with all of that stuff [the pending vegetables, she meant]?” I imagine if I had answered that I had 4 or 5 kids, she would not have expressed surprise, just a kind of mutual understanding. But to have no kids and yet a lot of plants struck her as odd to the point of requiring an explanation.
My grandfather, Elliott, was a scientific and gifted gardener. He kept journals, taping photographs into their pages and jotting notes even in the rain, so that the ink on his journal pages became spotted and bled – its own visceral record of that day’s conditions. He possessed both skill and passion for cultivating the fruits of the earth, and took great delight in his annual delivery of pungent fish-based fertilizer. My father also gardened at times. There are memories of a lovely garden at our home in Pittsburgh (a favorite home from a gypsy-like childhood that took us from Niagara Falls to suburban Atlanta). I would venture out to the garden that sat atop the retaining wall at the base of our steep back yard in Pittsburgh's Carrick neighborhood, and examine the rich black soil beneath the lettuce leaves each morning for snails. I was was thrilled to find them both in and out of their shells. I imagined the garden as a labyrinth from the snails’ perspective and savored my early-morning communion with these mysterious creatures. I particularly loved seeing their whole bodies seize up as their antennae yielded in my direction, sensing the presence of my 6-year old human body.
My grandfather, Elliott, was a scientific and gifted gardener. He kept journals, taping photographs into their pages and jotting notes even in the rain, so that the ink on his journal pages became spotted and bled – its own visceral record of that day’s conditions. He possessed both skill and passion for cultivating the fruits of the earth, and took great delight in his annual delivery of pungent fish-based fertilizer. My father also gardened at times. There are memories of a lovely garden at our home in Pittsburgh (a favorite home from a gypsy-like childhood that took us from Niagara Falls to suburban Atlanta). I would venture out to the garden that sat atop the retaining wall at the base of our steep back yard in Pittsburgh's Carrick neighborhood, and examine the rich black soil beneath the lettuce leaves each morning for snails. I was was thrilled to find them both in and out of their shells. I imagined the garden as a labyrinth from the snails’ perspective and savored my early-morning communion with these mysterious creatures. I particularly loved seeing their whole bodies seize up as their antennae yielded in my direction, sensing the presence of my 6-year old human body.
As an adult, however, gardening eluded me. I always enjoyed fresh, local produce, and noticed how my body seemed to hum after eating tomatoes, squash, or cantaloupe just plucked from the vine. But for years I was far too busy and far too transient to consider gardening. The few plants I attempted to keep – often in my art studio or kitchen – usually died from neglect.
In 2013, when my boyfriend Jason and I were in our first year of living together at an apartment in a congested part of Atlanta, Jason decided to claim four of the raised beds in our apartment complex’s community garden (he had little competition). Having grown up with parents and grandparents who faithfully planted and tended big gardens each year as a matter of subsistence, Jason was eager to create his own garden as a way of putting down roots and feeling more at home in our strange urban landscape. While he worked out of town as a geologist doing field work each week, come the weekends, he’d invite me to join him as he sowed new seeds, plucked weeds, or erected a trellis for pole beans. His eager invitations were almost always met with the same response: I was too busy to join him.
As a ceramic sculptor and art instructor teaching college courses and classes at several different community centers across Atlanta, I was the least fun girlfriend ever. When not teaching or commuting to and from teaching, I spent the bulk of my time crafting lesson plans, grading student work, applying to teaching jobs, or working in my studio. I was slogging through, waiting to land that long-sought full-time college art teaching job, at which point (I told myself), my “real life” could begin. Meanwhile, Jason conjured carrots, eggplants, green beans, and peppers from the soil of our community garden. He took over another bed and then another, triumphing over plunderers and vandals, and taking a young boy named Zalen – who often played unattended – under his wing as a sort of garden helper. Jason tried to mask his disappointment at my lack of participation in his gardening efforts (which he hoped would be our gardening efforts), but I could see the secretly crestfallen look in his eyes every time I declined his invitation to join him for weeding or harvesting.
In 2013, when my boyfriend Jason and I were in our first year of living together at an apartment in a congested part of Atlanta, Jason decided to claim four of the raised beds in our apartment complex’s community garden (he had little competition). Having grown up with parents and grandparents who faithfully planted and tended big gardens each year as a matter of subsistence, Jason was eager to create his own garden as a way of putting down roots and feeling more at home in our strange urban landscape. While he worked out of town as a geologist doing field work each week, come the weekends, he’d invite me to join him as he sowed new seeds, plucked weeds, or erected a trellis for pole beans. His eager invitations were almost always met with the same response: I was too busy to join him.
As a ceramic sculptor and art instructor teaching college courses and classes at several different community centers across Atlanta, I was the least fun girlfriend ever. When not teaching or commuting to and from teaching, I spent the bulk of my time crafting lesson plans, grading student work, applying to teaching jobs, or working in my studio. I was slogging through, waiting to land that long-sought full-time college art teaching job, at which point (I told myself), my “real life” could begin. Meanwhile, Jason conjured carrots, eggplants, green beans, and peppers from the soil of our community garden. He took over another bed and then another, triumphing over plunderers and vandals, and taking a young boy named Zalen – who often played unattended – under his wing as a sort of garden helper. Jason tried to mask his disappointment at my lack of participation in his gardening efforts (which he hoped would be our gardening efforts), but I could see the secretly crestfallen look in his eyes every time I declined his invitation to join him for weeding or harvesting.
Fast forward two years, and much has changed. More than can be summarized in a few short sentences. Gardening, for me, has emerged as a call (at once instinctively human, ancestral, and personal) to slow down, to cultivate and tend, to practice patient effort, and – perhaps most obvious yet most significant – to literally put down roots. Jason and I have struggled lately with the notion of where, how, and when we envision putting down roots in our lives together. We keep bumping up against questions we can’t answer as we consider the complicating factors and desires that differ and run at cross-purposes to our circumstances.
What I feel God is showing me in this season of my life is that surrender yields the clearest path to peace. There are the stories we tell ourselves about what will make us happy, about where we want to be, about who we are and what we “should” be doing with our lives. And then there is our life, as it unfolds day by day. Even with the clearest aim and firmest commitment to what we believe we are meant to do, life takes its turns – upending the fragile architecture of our identities and personal narratives. Is the loss of these matchstick-and-glue constructions really the end of the world? For me, it has marked the beginning of a new life. One in which I am compelled to live not by what I think I know, but by where I feel led by the Holy Spirit, moment by moment and day by day.
And for me, right now, I feel led to mix rich black soil with fertile manure until my fingernail beds are lined with dark crescents and my cuticles fray. I feel led to sow seeds – miraculous capsules of infinite life and intelligence – in tiny cups on my windowsill, and to tend them as they grow into fledgling plants. I feel led to transplant these fledglings into containers on my porch, and into our raised beds, to feed and monitor them daily as they grow or don’t grow, as they flower, yield, go to seed. I feel called to spend as much time as possible in communion with these growing wonders – outside – drinking in the same sunlight and fresh air they thrive on.
What I feel God is showing me in this season of my life is that surrender yields the clearest path to peace. There are the stories we tell ourselves about what will make us happy, about where we want to be, about who we are and what we “should” be doing with our lives. And then there is our life, as it unfolds day by day. Even with the clearest aim and firmest commitment to what we believe we are meant to do, life takes its turns – upending the fragile architecture of our identities and personal narratives. Is the loss of these matchstick-and-glue constructions really the end of the world? For me, it has marked the beginning of a new life. One in which I am compelled to live not by what I think I know, but by where I feel led by the Holy Spirit, moment by moment and day by day.
And for me, right now, I feel led to mix rich black soil with fertile manure until my fingernail beds are lined with dark crescents and my cuticles fray. I feel led to sow seeds – miraculous capsules of infinite life and intelligence – in tiny cups on my windowsill, and to tend them as they grow into fledgling plants. I feel led to transplant these fledglings into containers on my porch, and into our raised beds, to feed and monitor them daily as they grow or don’t grow, as they flower, yield, go to seed. I feel called to spend as much time as possible in communion with these growing wonders – outside – drinking in the same sunlight and fresh air they thrive on.
The fulfillment found in marveling at the daily changes and unique designs of the life unfolding in my back yard has displaced my need to sacrifice daily joy in pursuit of a larger, more “noble” goal. This newfound calling to tend the earth seems to be a study in rhythms, in the quiet power of slow and steady growth and nurturing. I am learning that, as humans, we are not architects of our destiny so much as agents of a much larger intelligence, in a much more profound unfolding plan. I am happy now to be still, to take this unfolding one day at a time, to not know or fear or force or push for what lies around the next corner.
In this space of surrender, suspension, stillness, and slowness, I am experiencing a peace and contentment I have never known. I am more aware of the goodness that abounds in my life, and am less concerned with explaining myself to myself, or to anyone else. I feel like someone who was imprisoned for years and now is free – as though the world were new to me.
In this space of surrender, suspension, stillness, and slowness, I am experiencing a peace and contentment I have never known. I am more aware of the goodness that abounds in my life, and am less concerned with explaining myself to myself, or to anyone else. I feel like someone who was imprisoned for years and now is free – as though the world were new to me.
Like a seed that has just cracked open after a long incubation in the dark, damp earth, the tender green sprout of my being unfurls now up and into a bath of sunlight that has been there all along on the other side of this dark horizon, awaiting my emergence. I don’t want to argue, don’t want to explain, don’t want to pretend to have any answers. I don’t want to cheat the present by getting lost in guessing at what shape I may take in the next stage of my becoming, or imagining how strange my unfolding must look to anyone else. I just want to bathe in this sunlight, drink in the rain as it falls, and let this growth happen as it will. I surrender, I trust, and I see that this garden I tend, tends me.