Category: Gardening

Come and See: Ripe for Harvest

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Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true.  I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers.

They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”
John 4: 31-42

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?
~Wendell Berry “The Man Born to Farming” from Farming: A Handbook

My dad had a standard sign-off whenever I called my parents long-distance once a week from college.

He always said, “you know what you’re there for…”

At first I puzzled over that phrase. I knew I was in school to study and get a degree, but what was going to happen after that was still an unknown. Yet the weekly reminder was a good one. He was telling me that I was a seed sown in rich soil, and what I learned would help me grow and thrive as long as I remembered to put my roots down and drink deeply from that well of knowledge.

So it was with the Samaritan woman at the well – Jesus waited for her in the heat of the day for a reason. She was a seed sown, meant to bring others to share in the harvest of the good news she had heard.

So we too are here for a purpose. We truly need one another, to become interwoven and linked, both visibly and invisibly.

I am woven around you and you around me; together we grow and thrive when tended and — just as intended.

But more than anything, we need our Gardener.
We are sown, nurtured, grown under His care.
He knows what we are here for, and now, so do we.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together. Past posts can be found by searching “Come and See” on this blog.

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Restoration

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Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

A single green sprouting thing
would restore me . . .
~Jane Kenyon from “February: Thinking of Flowers”

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
~ John Macleod Campbell Crum – two stanzas from “Now the Green Blade Riseth”

…times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things. Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter–
it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring.

Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.

Our inward winters take many forms–failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them–protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance–we can learn what they have to teach us. Then, we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in winter, the most dismaying season of all.
~Parker Palmer from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Why did “Let It Go” from the Disney movie “Frozen” resonate as a universal pop anthem some ten years ago?

Maybe we needed the call to emerge from our dormancy, to reach out in our God-given ability to overcome challenges, despite everything the outward and inward winters blow at us.

I trust, from all I’ve learned in His Word  —  I have only gone underground temporarily and will soon emerge restored in renewal.

The cold never bothered me anyway?
Yes, of course it did, but it is not the end of my story.

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Harboring Joy

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You recall how winter
colored your love, left it

overly delicate, like a flower
skimmed of all fragrance.

You hear in the long last notes
of the nightingale’s song

how to harbor what’s left
of joy, how spring clutches

the green shoot of life and holds
on and on through summer, prepares

for no end that is sure in coming,
the fall ever endlessly repeating.
~Maureen Doallas “Recounting Seasons”, from Neruda’s Memoirs 

Like in old cans of paint the last green hue,
these leaves are sere and rough and dull-complected
behind the blossom clusters in which blue
is not so much displayed as it’s reflected;

They do reflect it imprecise and teary,
as though they’d rather have it go away,
and just like faded, once blue stationery,
they’re tinged with yellow, violet and gray;

As in an often laundered children’s smock,
cast off, its usefulness now all but over,
one senses running down a small life’s clock.

Yet suddenly the blue revives, it seems,
and in among these clusters one discovers
a tender blue rejoicing in the green.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Blue Hydrangea” Translation by Bernhard Frank

One of my greatest joys is watching our farm’s plants as days become weeks, then months, and as years flow by, the seasons’ palettes repeat endlessly.

In the “olden” days, many farmers kept daily hand-written diaries to track the events of the seasons: when the soil was warm enough to sow, when the harvest was ready, the highs and lows of temperature fluctuations, how many inches in the rain gauge, how deep the snow.

Now we follow the years with a swift scroll in our photo collection in our phones: the tulips bloomed two weeks later this year, or the tomatoes ripened early or the pears were larger two years ago.

I am comforted things tend to repeat predictably year after year, yet I can spot subtle differences. Our hydrangea bushes are a harbinger of soil conditions and seasonal change: they bloomed a darker burgundy color this year, with fewer blue tones. Their blooms always fade eventually into blended earth tones, then blanche, finally losing color altogether and becoming skeletal.

And so it is with me. I collect joy by noticing each change, knowing the repetition of the seasons and the cycle of blooming will continue as I too fade.

I am only a recorder of fact, documenting as long as I’m able.

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A Thing or Two

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My father always knew the secret
name of everything—
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball—
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crewcuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you’ll learn a thing or two.

Now it’s forty years later,
and I’m packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you’re never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
whatchamacallits, thingamabobs.
~Ronald Wallace “Hardware” from Time’s Fancy

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also . . . 

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums . . . 

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon
Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.
~Seamus Heaney “A Call” from ‘Poems That Make Grown Men Cry’

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down
By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
~Seamus Heaney from “Digging” from Death of a Naturalist

My father was a complex man. As I’ve aged, I understand better where my own complicated nature comes from.

As inscrutable as he could be, there were things I absolutely understood about him:

he was a man of action
– he never just sat, never took a nap, never wasted a day of his life without accomplishing something tangible.

he was a man of the soil
– he plowed and harrowed and sowed and fertilized and weeded and cut brush and harvested

he was a man of inventiveness
– he figured out a better way, he transformed tools and buildings, he started from scratch and built the impossible

he didn’t explain himself
– and never felt the need to.

Time keeps ticking on without him here, now 30 years since he took his last breath as the clock pendulum swung back and forth in his bedroom. He was taken too young for all the projects he still had in mind.

He handed off a few to me.
Some I have done.
Some still wait, I’m not sure why.

My regret is not understanding how much he needed to hear how loved he was. He seemed fine without it being said.

But he wasn’t fine. And neither was I.

I wish I had said it when I had the chance.
I guess I am digging it out from the soil of my heart now.

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To Yield to Change

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I went out to cut a last batch of zinnias this
morning from the back fencerow and got my shanks
chilled for sure: furrowy dark gray clouds with
separating fringes of blue sky-grass: and the dew

beaded up heavier than the left-overs of the rain:
in the zinnias, in each of two, a bumblebee
stirring in slow motion. Trying to unwind
the webbed drug of cold, buzzing occasionally but

with a dry rattle: bees die with the burnt honey
at their mouths, at least: the fact’s established:
it is not summer now and the simmering buzz is out of
heat: the zucchini blossoms falling show squash

overgreen with stunted growth: the snapdragons have
suckered down into a blossom or so: we passed
into dark last week the even mark of day and night
and what we hoped would stay we yield to change.
~A.R. Ammons  “Equinox” from Complete Poems

I yield now
to the heaviness of transition
from summer to autumn –
the soaking morning fog, with
dew clinging like teardrops,
a chill in the air
means I sweater-wrap my days.

It is time for change, reluctant as I may be;
both day and night now compete equally for my time
and each will win.

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Each Petal a Hymn

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Something about the relentless beauty
of the dahlias this year makes me forget
lists and calls and news and aches as
I stand beside them in a splendor stupor,
watching them bloom in real time, not
wanting to miss a moment of the long stems
rising, the red color deepening then fading
from the petals as they age. I imagine a time lapse
begins, and the world’s winter white, then greening
again, and now a hundred years pass,
now five hundred, a thousand, and the garden
bed is gone and the fence is gone and
the trees and the ditch and the home
are gone, and there’s no way to know
this was once a place where dahlias grew.
Is it any wonder, then, I call to you, ask you
to come stand here with me to watch
the dahlias open themselves to the sun,
each petal a hymn to the present,
a history soon to be forgotten, a shimmer in time
we might put in a vase and marvel as
all around it the whole world spins.
 ~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “A Scrap in Time”

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon…

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

Home is where one starts from.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
~T. S. Eliot, verses from “East Coker” in Four Quartets

What a pity flowers can utter no sound!
—A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle…
oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!
~Henry Ward Beecher

A flower garden is a place for prayer and hymns of praise.

When I meet a truly great gardener, like my friend Jean who has grown and hybridized dahlias, what I see growing in the soil is a choral composition of petals, leaves and roots.

Jean has passionately cared for these plants for many of her nine decades of life. They reflect that love in every spiral and swirl, hue and gradient of color, showing stark symmetry and delightful variegation.

Arising from the plainest of homely and knobby look-alike tubers grow these luxurious beauties of infinite variety. I am stunned by each one, captivated, realizing that same Creator ensures we too bloom from mere dust, becoming a hymn of praise arising from every fiber of our being.

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An Itsy-Bitsy Life

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There is always an enormous temptation in all of life
to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends
and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral,
simply to step aside from the gaps
where the creeks and winds pour down, saying,
I never merited this grace, quite rightly,
and then to sulk along the rest of your days
on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. 

The world is wilder than that in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright.

We are making hay
when we should be making whoopee;
we are raising tomatoes
when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Other than a few exceptional circumstances in my life,
I have always played it safe:
living an itsy-bitsy life being a down-home, don’t rock the boat,
work hard and live-a-quiet-life kind of person,
growing hay and tomatoes and a few other things…

My grandparents lived that way, my parents lived that way.
I feel like it is bound in the twists and turns of my DNA.

I do know a thing or two about sulking on the edge of rage,
lost in a morass of seething bitterness about the state of the world.  Yet if I were honest about it, the discontent I feel is all about me, always about me.

I want to have accomplished more to deserve taking up space in my days on earth. But that’s a problem we all have, isn’t it?

We’re unworthy of such unmerited grace as has been shown to us, raising us from the holes we dig for ourselves. 
It is such a pure Gift I wait for,
borne out of God’s radical sacrifice
deserving from me a life of radical gratitude,
even when I choose to live it out a little quietly,
making hay and raising tomatoes.

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The Serenity of the Rose

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The serene philosophy of the pink rose is steadying. 
Its fragrant, delicate petals open fully
and are ready to fall,
without regret or disillusion,
after only a day in the sun. 
It is so every summer. 
One can almost hear their pink, fragrant murmur
as they settle down upon the grass:
‘Summer, summer, it will always be summer.’
~Rachel Peden 

It will always be summer
if we let go in the midst of the brief brightness,
when all is glorious. 

No cold winds, no unending days of rain,
no mildew, no iced walkways,
no 18 hours of darkness,
no turning brown with mold and rot.

Let us be strong and serene through all seasons
rather than letting go at the height of summer. 

Let us thrive steady through the hard times
rather than withering at the peak of beauty.

Let us age, let us turn gray, let us wrinkle, and go bald.

It may always be summer — someday — but not yet. 

Not here. Not now.

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The Bees of the Invisible

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Let us go forward quietly,
forever making for the light,
and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge
that we are as others are
(and that others are as we are),
and that it is right to love one another
in the best possible way –
believing all things,
hoping for all things,
and enduring all things. 
~Vincent Van Gogh from a Letter to Theo Van Gogh – 3 April 1878

I have lived so long
On the cold hills alone . . .
I loved the rock
And the lean pine trees,
Hated the life in the turfy meadow,
Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.
I have lived so long
Under the high monotony of starry skies,
I am so cased about
With the clean wind and the cold nights,
People will not let me in
To their warm gardens
Full of bees.
~Janet Loxley Lewis “Austerity”


Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being.
It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth
into ourselves, so deeply, so painfully and passionately,
that its essence can rise again, invisible, inside of us.
We are the bees of the invisible.
We wildly collect the honey of the visible,
to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
~Rainier Maria Rilke in a letter to his friend Witold Hulewicz, 1925

I am convinced,
reading the news,
too many people are forced to survive
in a world cold and cruel,
without warmth or safety,
too many empty stomachs,
no healing hands for injury or disease.

Our country was trying to help
up until the last few months
when so much has been pulled away.

No longer are we, the helper bees, sent to the invisible,
bringing tangible hope and light, food and meds,
to those who have so little.

No longer do we bring collected honey
to the suffering, the ill, the poor and
invisible who share this planet.

Oh Lord, turn us away from such austerity.
Let us not forget how to share
the humming riches of Your warm garden.

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What is Waiting Behind the Wall

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If ever we see those gardens again,
The summer will be gone—at least our summer.
Some other mockingbird will concertize
Among the mulberries, and other vines
Will climb the high brick wall to disappear.

How many footpaths crossed the old estate—
The gracious acreage of a grander age—
So many trees to kiss or argue under,
And greenery enough for any mood.
What pleasure to be sad in such surroundings.

At least in retrospect. For even sorrow
Seems bearable when studied at a distance,
And if we speak of private suffering,
The pain becomes part of a well-turned tale
Describing someone else who shares our name.

Still, thinking of you, I sometimes play a game.
What if we had walked a different path one day,
Would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere
The way a pebble tossed into a brook
Might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

The trick is making memory a blessing,
To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,
Of wanting nothing more than what has been,
To know the past forever lost, yet seeing
Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.
~Dana Gioia “The Lost Garden” from Interrogations at Noon.

At present we are on the outside of the world,
the wrong side of the door. . . .
We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.
But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling
with the rumour that it will not always be so.
Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C.S. Lewis from The Weight of Glory

Memory can play tricks,
either smoothing over
the many potholes in the road of life,
or digging the holes so deep,
I fall in and am lost.

Whenever I am feeling regret
for the things I have done,
or all that I have left undone,
I remember I have walked on
paths of beauty beyond imagining.

I wouldn’t change much about what has been,
knowing there is much more beauty to come.

I remember gates and doors I could not open.
Just a peek told me all I needed to know:
there is a hidden, lost garden just waiting,
still blooming, still inspiring, still brimming
full of everything any of us could ever need.

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