The Garden of Your Soul
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- Created on Sunday, 18 July 2010 01:00
- Written by Karen Lewis Foley
Readings: Malcolm X, on his childhood garden and especially his love of growing snow peas;
Paragraphs from Pat Stone’s reflection, “Breaking Ground,” in Greenprints.
Little Malcolm lies between his rows of snow peas and gazes at clouds, “thinks all kinds of things.” Grown-up Pat Stone breaks the soil, almost does battle with the earth and decides that gardening is not a natural activity but “an interface, a connecting portal.” I sit on the back porch, drink in drifts of blue gernaniums and multi-colored daylilies, notice how the row of ten-inch twigs I brought from Massachusetts to our new home in Maine four years ago have become a hedge of huge shrubs. Quite simply, I love this. I always have.
Gardening is good for the soul, if you like doing it. But gardens themselves are good for us—aside from the nourishment we get from vegetables and fruits. My mother loved flowers but was unwilling to get down in the dirt. So my father planted, and we children had to weed fifteen minutes a day for our allowance, a form of indentured servitude that should have killed any love of gardening in me but somehow, happily, failed to. I’m sure my mother missed some benefit from her garden. She never got to see baby turtles hatch out and scramble for the pond. She never felt the tug of weed coming free from soil. She never looked up from the dirt, sweat dripping down her face, and realized that what she was doing was bound up with the colors and forms before her eyes. But she must have derived some inner sustenance from seeing her iris and poppies blow in the June breeze. It couldn’t have been merely a matter of show to her. I do believe the garden fed her soul, as Malcolm X’s view of the sky through his straight rows of pea plants fed his.
But the work of gardening, too, is good for the soul who loves it. Whether you plant in April soil, pull summer weeds, soak dry earth, or destroy insect and fungus, the rhythms of physical work free our gerbil wheel brains and focus our attention on what is before us. Ah, the meditation of moving mulch; the discipline of pruning excess; the coming-clean of pulled weeds, like confession. And ah, the prayer for rain!
Simply doing gardening requires discipline—as we know if we neglect it for long. Just like praying, going back to it after a time away, you face a bit of a wilderness. Even the very love of gardening is a spiritual exercise—like love for a human being, or justice, or our daily work. If we love it, gardening demands much of us—it can break our heart; this spring a late frost stopped flower buds in their tracks and turned my hostas to mush. And like whatever breaks our heart, it can gift us incredibly. If f you connect with nature and yourself while mucking about in dirt—if your spirit soars with the arrival of January’s seed catalogues—if growing things is a holy exercise—then you’ll agree with F. Vernon Chandler who says that gardening may be “a sacrament for a ‘creation-centered spirituality’.” [“Gardening as a Sacramental Theology,” Good News]
“Life is a chance to grow a soul,” said the late great Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies. So a garden is a chance to grow lettuce or roses—and for some of us, a soul. It is no accident that the life of the spirit finds expression in garden metaphors—starting with that very word, “growth.” I’ve learned so long and deeply about the inner life from gardening, probably because I’ve been doing it most of my life. One lesson is that even indentured servitude cannot kill my love for being involved with the growth of plants, people, communities, and the spirit. I’ve always had to have something living near me. When I went off to college I bought an indestructible dime store plant that traveled with me through the years, dividing and expanding. And when they take me off to a nursing home, they’d better bring along some of my plants and a watering can.
The years have brought other lessons forth from my interactions with soil and sunlight, roots and rain, bugs and rocks, blossoms and blight. Here’s Karen’s List of those I’ve personally experienced. I think their application broadens out to many aspects of our lives: relationships, work, growth—some of them even to Life itself.
1) When you put a spade into New England ground you’ll probably hit a rock. There is only one good way to get rocks of out of the earth: working gradually and gently around them with the shovel tip, exercising selective leverage, is more effective than bashing away at them. Ah, so in rocky life situations.
2) Make holes only as wide and deep as you need, and don’t dig yourself into one.
3) Fertilizer is good. Too much fertilizer is very, very bad.
4) The best fertilizer is stuff that used to be alive and has died and is ready to make other things live.
5) Anything transplanted requires a lot of extra nurture and patience. This includes people who move to new homes or jobs. As I’ve been learning since our move four years ago.
6) Plants that are talked to grow better than plants tended in total silence. Not unlike most of us.
7) Too much of the wrong sort of attention—too much watering or anxious fussing—can kill a plant as surely as neglect.
8) Some plants you do not grow, but rather restrain. Like mint. In fact, in any garden that’s doing well, eventually the task may turn into keeping growth under control and giving away excess. Not unlike clearing your attic, basement and garage of a lifetime accumulation.
9) Plants do not always do what they’re “supposed” to. I’ve planted short flowers in front of tall ones only to have them grow taller than the tall ones. I’ve planted thirty bulbs and seen not a one emerge.
10) Identical plants in the same location can grow very differently for no particular reason, kind of like children in a family. Once, of five sun-loving spirea, the largest and healthiest was the one that got the most shade.
11) What grows well for your neighbor may not grow at all for you, and vice versa. You have to learn your own earth, your own patterns of light and shade, damp and dry. As in love, in work, in all of life, you must discover and embrace what you love.
12) You may learn to love what you didn’t know you could. Maybe you dream of perfect roses, and you don’t care much for ferns, but someone gives you a clutch and you use them to fill an empty spot. And one day you look out at the ferns swaying in the breeze and your heart sings.
13) As a fallow year produces a better the next, so there is a time to rest, a time to let the earth recover, to dream and plan. Sometimes in our lives we need such a time for our hearts and souls to recover.
14) And finally, grace does abound to the greatest of sinners. Years ago I had a dreadful spot in my yard where nothing at all would grow: dry, sandy, rocky, apparently lifeless. Even plants that thrive in the poorest soil died. I tried improving the soil and nothing worked. I gave up and left the spot bare. One day a weed sprang up. But it had attractive reddish leaves. It was better than dirt, so I let it stay, but did not encourage it. You might guess—it grew into a lovely bush with feathery flower plumes and over the years got quite large. I think now it was probably a smoke bush. A stray seed must have blown in. Why it loved my patch of dead earth, I don’t know. Maybe it needed a truly empty spot to get a hold on life. That’s often the way with The Spirit—it needs us to be empty in order to be noticed and begin to grow.
Garden lessons are not at all, as Pat Stone says, what we learn directly from nature. Gardening helps us learn about our interdependence with nature. We cooperate with some aspects of nature and try to control others in order to produce something that is neither wild nor artificial. A garden is something neither nature nor I can create alone. We need each other to make a garden. I’ve come to realize this co-creation is what I love most about gardening. “Only God can make a tree,” wrote Joyce Kilmer; but only you or I can prune and protect it.
Teresa of Avila, a great sixteenth century Spanish Carmelite nun, used the garden as metaphor for the life of prayer [Book of Her Life]. She describes spiritual life as a garden receiving its life-giving water in four stages. I will briefly describe Teresa’s “Four Waters” and how they relate to the growth of the soul. I get this material from a masters’ thesis by Pat Lynch, a woman I met in a spiritual direction seminar some years ago. I will attempt to find parallels in contemporary gardening.
The “First Water” is from the well—the hand-drawn kind we hardly use any more. As the gardener hauls water from the well, so the spiritual “beginner” must buckle down—meditate, pray, attend worship, engage in service. “Beginners in prayer,” says Teresa, “…are those who draw water from the well. This involves a lot of work on their part….” A drought forced a total outdoor watering ban just when I had just planted shrubs and flowers which would die without extra watering. A watering can was the only method allowed—today’s equivalent of going to the well. So for weeks I hauled cansful from the tap and bucketsful of laundry and dish water to my new babies. New rhododendrons, wilted by the hot sun, slowly raised their leaves in silent thanks and resurrection. Teresa says, we do work, but it is God who gives the results. And in prayer life and spiritual explorations, so I find. I sit and sit and sit and nothing happens. Only subtly and over time, something does. I have to humbly recognize that what is happening is not my doing. Only it might not happen if I did not sit and sit and sit.
The “Second Water” comes from a water wheel or aqueduct. This requires less labor—like watering with a garden hose. The second stage of prayer, says Teresa, offers quietness. Have you ever stood quietly with a garden hose in hand, nothing to do but be present to the wetness of water and the sights and smells of growing things? It’s like the calm of meditation or centering prayer. Because here we find closeness with God and grow in virtue, says Teresa, most of us never bother to go beyond it. This is a very nice place to be. But there is more, if we do venture beyond.
To the “Third Water,” when our job in the garden is simply to direct water provided by an irrigation system—this might be like placing a sprinkler or using an inground irrigation system, turning it on, and letting it do the work. In this phase of prayer life, God does most of the work and the soul seems to sleep; one’s faculties “neither fail to function nor understand how they function.” It’s like going for a walk while my garden is watered by a sprinkler. In fact, says Teresa, God wants the soul to rest now. The soul, now fruitful, can delight in God and what God has brought forth. So it is able to both act and contemplate. Many of us who cultivate a prayer life struggle to balance action with contemplation. Someone has said he wakes up each morning unsure whether, that day, to savor, or to save the world. Don’t we all sometimes!
Finally we come to Teresa’s “Fourth Water” which maybe you can guess—is rain. The modern analogy is, well—rain. The gardener does nothing. Water comes of its own accord, like grace. The gardener works, but does not experience the work as labor. Although, when heavy rainfalls produce an abundance of weeds, we might say it feels like a lot of labor! Except that in the middle of weeding, I rejoice in the lushness that surrounds me. A bit of a paradox. This is a mysterious stage of the soul. Here is what Teresa says about it: “In this fourth water the soul isn’t in possession of its senses, but it rejoices without understanding what it is rejoicing in. It understands that it is enjoying a good in which are gathered together all good, but this good is incomprehensible.” What she’s describing is a mystical state.
The danger here is that the soul, so freely watered, may come to rely on itself alone. Teresa herself gave up praying at one point. But you can’t do this because stopping all spiritual work inhibits the relationship between the soul and the holy. I believe this is true not only in spiritual maturity, but any place on a spiritual journey. People tell me if they stop meditating or praying, it is hard to get back to it, and I discovered this too, the one time I stopped regular meditation.
Teresa’s “Four Waters” are about how water gets to a garden and what part the gardener plays. And it’s about how God gets to a soul who longs for connection with the holy.
If you garden as I do, you might find this metaphor intellectually satisfying—or not. I’m guessing that if you do garden, whether the metaphor works or not for you, the act of being in your garden and co-creating with nature is something you experience physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But if gardening doesn’t float your boat, something else may. Like, well maybe, boats! Sailing over the waters of life. Some ministers preach about baseball—I’m not any good at that because baseball doesn’t do it for me. But maybe the Garden of Your Soul is a playing field, or a card game. A map of the universe and its energetic equations. A journey through a vast wilderness, or over a great sea.
We live the Gardens of Our Lives in our families of origin, the families we create, our loves and friendships with people and animals. We live our spiritual lives in how we use our leisure time, the work we do, the face we bring to the world each day. And all depends, like a garden, both on our desires and choices and on forces beyond our control. And it’s all, like a garden, sometimes touched by grace. The spiritual life is not a thing set apart. For me, being intentional about it means I need to pay conscious attention, just as I need to weed, water and deadhead. But all of us have a spiritual life going on inside us that is lived out as we engage life daily—how we live in relationship with ourselves and the world. Some of the most “spiritual” people I know would never call themselves that, and never pray. But the life of our spirit will show in our living; as the Bible says, “By their fruits shall you know them.” May the Gardens of our Souls know our own hard work, may they be blessed by enough rain and grace, and may they bring forth abundantly the sights and smells of flowers and the nourishment of fruit.
[Material on Teresa of Avila’s writing is from a Master of Arts in Pastoral Studies thesis by Patricia D. Lynch, Spiritual Wisdom from the Garden: An Examination of Garden Imagery in Scripture, Tradition, and Contemporary Writing, 1998.]