Gardening for the soul

     I have gardened for many years in different climates through different phases of my life.  The garden has played many different roles for me, all of them healing.  As a young girl, my mother would send me out to the garden when she was making dinner to pick a sprig of rosemary or a handful of tender beans.  This was a delightful way to help and an excellent education.  Where did food come from?  I had some clear experiences about that.  I had even attempted to grow food plants from seed.  I would not be successful at that until much later in life, but knowing it was possible, watching the miracle of a seed sprouting and beginning to grow was very powerful for me. 
     The next healing experience I had with gardening was when I got my first migraine headache.  I was a teenager and dreaded the possibility that I too would suffer what my mother suffered all the time.  I woke up one night with an excruciating headache.   I knew I would not be able to walk if I tried to get up for a pill.  Somehow I know I could breathe the headache out the window into the tomato worm my mother had been complaining about that she couldn't seem to find.  I took several breaths into the pain and exhaled it out the window, imagining it all landing in that fat tomato worm.  My headache very quickly disappeared.  The next day, I told my mom about my headache going away and she was glad for me but preoccupied.  Until she went out to the garden.  I will never forget the look on her face as she approached me with a branch from the tomato plant.  She was flabbergasted, speechless.  She showed me the branch which held the tomato worm, dead in its tracks.  Completely in tact, otherwise healthy looking, but completely dead.  We looked at the worm and each other and said nothing.  But my reality changed in that moment.  I realized that there were invisible forces and powers, energies that we could play a part in.  I don't think this reality was really all that new for me.  It was simply now confirmed.

     So several boyfriends, college applications, moving out of the house, dorms, a year abroad, and much family turmoil later, I found myself having another healing experience in the garden.  I had moved into a student cooperative at UC Davis that had adjoining gardens.  I had planted some peas and they were coming up, my first crop!  I was very upset about a boyfriend, to the level of panic attack.  I decided to go out to the garden.  I began building a trellis for my peas to grow on.  Stakes and string and hours later, I had completely forgotten about the boyfriend and the panic.  I was so grateful for that little plot of dirt, those peas and all that came after.  It felt so real to bring food in from the garden and prepare a meal for myself.  Nothing I learned in college could prepare me for life as simply and practically as that.  Self-nurture and self love.  I discovered a joy in the mutually nurturing relationship with the plants that is so direct and undeniable.  The plants, unlike other people, would respond to my care immediately and palpably.  I can pour my love into them unreservedly and they pour it back out to me magnified.  They do not run away, tell me they would prefer someone else tend to them, tell me they are moving to another state, or going back to the gardener they were with before.  They always give their whole life to me.  Something very deep heals inside me every time I bring in a basket brimming with food.  The thing is, many plants I like to grow will even thrive on just a little nurture and then they turn around and shower me with so much love.  I am so grateful to them.  They have carried me through so many disappointments in myself, in others.  If I feel a failure, I can simply put some beans in the ground and a few weeks later, voila, the universe sending me a love message, reminding me of the miracle of life. 
     I soon learned that my love affair with the garden was not shared in the same way by everyone.  In fact, even my fellow gardeners in the community gardens had vastly differing approaches, views, and attitudes.  Just like anything, the garden was not immune to human conflict.  But I was oblivious to any of that when I was in the garden.  I inherited quite a large plot from a long-term gardener who had installed a drip system and my love affair took off.  I created a beautiful sanctuary for myself in that garden, there was a bed of german chamomile where one could lay down and watch the clouds, listen to the bugs, and smell the sweet fragrances of summer, there were many roses that dazzled the senses nearly year round, I grew enough flowers in the summer that I could fill my bicycle baskets with bouquets and sell them to the restaurants and cafes in town.  Everything in the garden delights.  I would go there and forget all my concerns about anything in the world.  I was one with the seasons, the cycles of life, a partner in the art of creation.  I tried to enlist several friends in my endeavors there only to find them staring back at me in consternation.  Most just didn't want to do the work, some did, but had different ideas of how it should be done.  I even tried to include a few boyfriends in the project.  They always seemed to have different ideas about how things should be done, and unlike the plants, they were very vocal about it, sometimes even rebelious.  In the end, I was happiest with just me and the plants.
     And then one of the biggest healings from the garden happened.  I had to let it go.  I had to move away and leave it all to the next community gardener.  I found someone to take it over, showed her everything, and then surrendered it all up.  It broke my heart.  I visited once after I moved away to find major changes happening and the sanctuary I had built was gone.  I had to go out into the world and find that sanctuary in other ways, in other gardens, and ultimately in my own heart.

The Gardeners Heart

Dig deep

pull out weedy roots

morning glory, bermuda grass, vetch

like fear, anger, despair

will crowd out love

in the gardener's heart

Pile dead things

whose time is done

memories from the past

into a heap

let it rot

cook in the middle

becoming compost

to mix into that newly weeded heart

extracting the best of the past

to feed our love of life

Rake, sift, mix

prepare, primp, and fiddle

until you are ready to take the plunge

plant the seed

how can this tiny hard nugget

be so precious

just like our hearts

waiting for the moment

when we feel the moist, warm soil

absorb, swell, and sprout

reach for the light

and fall in love 

completely with the sun

give up everything we can muster

life, limb, flower, fruit

we fling our offspring

into the wind

with a prayer to nourish this world we loved

as we begin to decay

and become compost

for our own heart

our own soul

to plant itself again