Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
~Marge Piercy “The Seven of Pentacles”

Our garden teaches us all kinds of life lessons, thanks to my husband’s hours of hard work preparing the soil, planting carefully and nurturing the emerging seedlings.

No garden tends itself – the growing plants reach out for connection to one another, for stability and companionship. The gardener nurtures, defends and harvests with an eye to preparing for the next growing season.

We who have been planted here need one another, interwoven and linked, both visibly and invisibly. I am woven around you and you around me; together we grow and thrive when tended, and as intended.

But more than anything else, we need our Gardener…