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When I lived in NYC, I realized one day that I had gone months without having my feet touch anything except asphalt, wood and carpet. No earth. No connectedness. Now, I love getting my hands in the dirt. But it wasn't always that way. It took me a while to understand what gardening really was. I used to think it was just about plants. Silly me.
My parents' gardening habits were entirely unalike. To my father, gardening was a vegetable enterprise, full of macho pride of produce. It was hard work, after his factory job, to come home and till and rake and weed and tend our big organic garden, but it was part of how he "put food on the table". He'd also race the neighbors to grow and have the first tomato, first pepper, largest squash, and so on. It gave him his greatest joy, however, to pack up bags of produce and give them away to people he knew needed them, or to the nuns at his church, or to a nearby orphanage. He wasn't just a poor blue collar guy then -- his work had made him a philanthropist, a man overflowing with generous gifts, and an eagerness to share them.
My mother was the flower gardener. She would spend part of the food money on flower plants. "Food for the soul?" she'd say from underneath her lashes to my father, who would always just smile. Mom would wake at dawn to spend time in her garden as the sun rose -- digging in the soil, transplanting things, talking to her garden and just thinking. It was the one time she was alone, with no other responsibilities. Her garden, as opposed to my father's orderly turf, was a wild mixture of blossoms, planned for color and blooming season. It was utterly, deliberately, unconventional and asymmetrical. Her garden plots were, in her words, "a beautiful mess of blossoms." Her garden was her ever-changing work of art, her performance art, her solace, her comfort and her joy. It transformed her into an artist.
I lived in an apartment when the gardening urge hit. I had always had houseplants, but that was not the same. I had a second floor flat with an 8x10 balcony/porch (screened in) off the bedroom. I got the "itch" to set up some containers. The itch turned into a craving -- and before I knew it, I was setting up shelves, interior latticework inside the screens, big pots of blossoms, window boxes on the floor with climbing vines in them and hanging plants. I started doing this annually and added a table and chairs. I lived there for almost 10 years, and had a gorgeous porch garden every year.
And here it is spring, and I am planting seeds for my house. I am eying garden catalogs, and shopping for window boxes that fit over a railing.
Working in the earth is a spiritually transformational act. It does not just change the earth. It changes us,too. Do you understand that experience? There is something that happens with our hands in the earth, cultivating a plant -- nurturing it -- watching it grow. Sure, there are the obvious lessons of the cycle of life. But there are also subtle lessons about planning, peacefulness, patience, mindfulness.
A garden is a patch of hope in the dirt -- a place to plant dreams, wishes, visual fantasies. They are fine places to pray, to meditate, to dream and wish. I love the calm of a garden, the way that tomorrow it will not look as it does today -- that it is in constant, imperceptible movement. It teaches me that change -- even radical change -- can happen bit by bit -- even when I am sleeping.
There is also something deeply womanly about gardening. I can't put my brain to the right word, but that approximates it -- in any case, I "get" that Mother Earth is a female archetype when I garden. It's not just because it is a nurturing activity, or that the life springs from the earth. There is more to it than that.
Is it the wild willfulness of the earth? Is it the feeling that my hands are digging in a mixture of laughter and tears? Is it that every woman who has ever tended a garden left a bit of herself behind, and that is hat I feel?
Or is
