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.
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.
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.
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.