The Garden as Demanding but Generous Lover

The virtues of farming are many.  I'm certain that I have scarcely scratched the surface...so to speak.  There is a kind of harmony intrinsic to it -- with the earth, with oneself, with the larger processes through which the cosmos expresses order.  Harmony and, to be sure, rhythm.  There is sun, rain, growth and labor; there is nourishment, replenishment, seed, bud, blossom, fruit.  There is growth and decay.  There are inches of rain, hours of sunlight, and degree days.  There is sowing and there is reaping to quote from Ecclesiastes.  There is the almost mystical privilege of participating in creation.  In my own yard.

But there is even more.  There is the bliss of recognized accomplishment.  Start weeding at one end of a row, work your way down and turn around and you can readily see the impact of your labors.  Plant a seed, wait a few weeks, and extract a radish.  Voila!  A month or two later...
...pluck a tomato...
...marry it with lettuce from a few rows over...
...introduce it to a couple of slices of bacon and bread and...
...ambrosia of the gods.

Nothing in my life has prepared me for the sheer joy of such ready validation.  The fields in which I have more routinely labored are opaque -- veiling, for the most part, any discernible correlation between investment and accomplishment.  Weekly I wrote a sermon, but despite the observable fact that it actually got preached and occasionally elicited positive remarks it was never possible to define "what good it did."  Similarly with classrooms, pastoral interactions, programmatic initiatives, and social justice advocacies.  In the course of them I believed the effort  to be important -- worth doing --  and generally felt some inner measure of satisfaction.  But no metrics were ever at hand to validate or demonstrate the benefit.  There was no "end of the row" to reach; no harvest basket to fill.  Never was there a time or place to turn around and note what you had accomplished.  Never a time to sit down and eat, tasting what you'd done.

The garden, then, is a demanding but generous lover -- the garden and beyond.

A local bee keeper has a couple of hives at the

back of our property and came by earlier this week to harvest honey.  When he returned to the driveway he asked if we wanted to taste some of "our"  honey.  Pulling one of the trays from the hive he held it near us and said, "just run your finger across the comb."  Following his instructions my finger was suddenly bathed in a golden ooze I couldn't wait to get to my lips.  And it was bliss -- surely the perspiration of heaven; the fruit of blossom and buzz and patient working...all in our very back yard.

A demanding but generous love -- now, when the harvest is warm and heavy, but later as well in the icy-dark recesses of winter.  We have, you see, been "laying by."  Greens in the freezer, and over the past several weeks sealed jars on the shelf.  Just last Saturday 75 pints of salsa -- the preservation of summer's tomatoes and peppers for a more austere season.  It is the anticipation noted by Iowa singer/songwriter Greg Brown...

"Taste a little of the summer
Taste a little of the summer
You can taste a little of the summer
My grandma's put it all in jars."

To feel, and see, and taste a little of the summer -- and all you've done in it.  The garden is, indeed, a demanding but generous lover.