Garden Mentors, Shining in Their Way

 

Sunflowers were in our imagination this year as we filled greenhouse trays with seeds. The infatuation paired nicely with our resolve to scale back on vegetables. Having finally comprehended that we aren’t growing to feed an army, we mentally allocated more space for flowers. We’ve added bees to the farmstead enterprise and they would certainly benefit from additional flora, and while we still had plenty of vegetables in mind for the season, the reapportionment of garden rows would better align with the fact that it is just the two of us and miscellaneous dinner guests consuming the harvest. We would still be over-supplied.

Sunflowers weren’t the only flowers we seeded. There was a floral diversity, but sunflowers were at the heart of our efforts. Lots of them. Lots of varieties of them. “Evening Sun,” “Chocolate Cherry,” “Earthwalker,” “Panache,” “Mammoth Grey Striped,” “Hopi Black Dye,” “Short Stuff,” among others. There are, perhaps, a hundred of them now transplanted into rows - a number to rival the tomatoes.

But why? 

To be sure, they are striking in their Seussian quirkiness. They stretch and sprawl and tower above it all. We like the fact that they reseed themselves and return, year after year. Presently, we like their resplendent mindfulness of the people of Ukraine as they reel under the onslaught of murderously colonizing tyranny, but their hapless plight couldn’t have been on our minds when we ordered the seeds. Sunflowers are a food source not only for humans but pollinators alike - an adequate justification even if there were no others. They are heliotropic - meaning they seek the light - which might be inspiration enough in this shade-throwing world. Too many of us politicians, preachers, commentators and citizens behave in ways betraying too much affinity for the night.

But surely there is something more.

I rather think, in addition to their other virtues, our enthrallment has something to do with the sunflower’s unabashed, full-throated but unpretentious openness. Their face is like an open hand - petals extended and exposed without precaution. There is no timidity, simply the forthright precocity that seems to say, “Here I am. Welcome.” 

Early in life we are commonly taught, “Don’t talk to strangers” - wise counsel for vulnerable children - but unfortunately too few of us outgrow the caution. I'm not immune.  More times than I want to admit I "pass by on the other side of the road" like the foils in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan.  The result, of course, is a collective of adults malnourished by sameness and suffocated by a seduction of safety that is neither tenable nor safe.

The sunflowers, by contrast, are unperturbed and unprotected. They are simply open. There is no artifice or opposition; simply the uninhibited, fully exposed offer of themselves to the sun…and beyond. 

In brightness. In beauty. In seed. In stately grandeur.

A face, fully offered. A hand, open wide and hospitably proffered. Content to be, or be given. And received.

Whimsically, winsomely open.
Turning toward the light.

We could do worse by way of mentors.

Blessedly in the Midst of It All

 It was, ostensibly, to enjoy the wildflowers.  We had spent the better part of the day working companionably outdoors – Lori supporting the burgeoning tomato bushes, while I mowed the grass.  And, indeed, as I had trimmed the path around the prairie, near the apiary, and then back around toward the house, the eruption of wildflowers had truthfully caught my attention.  

Finishing, then, the more detailed grooming, we boarded the utility cart for a look around.  The day had been sunny and blue, with cottony tufts of intermittent clouds; warm but not hot, with gentle breezes replacing the blustery winds of recent weeks.  It had been pleasant enough and satisfying work of the sort that makes for easy sleep and contented dreams.  

And as we crept our way around the pathways, the wildflowers were truly joyful – bergamot and blackeyed Susans, sunflowers and verbena, along with others whose names I need to learn.  The bees should be very happy at all the culinary options.

But as satisfying as was the ride – as lovely as were the flowers – the richer, still lovelier comprehension, was the sense of awe-filled appreciation that this is the anchoring place of our lives.  Yes, we have brought our hands and our souls to this place; yes, we have broken and sowed, we have planted and opened; yes, our fingerprints are here.  But I will be so bold as to assert that our efforts have served to magnify rather than stifle the personality of this piece of earth.  We have resisted the arrogance of forcing it to be something that it’s not, but have endeavored to hear its voice and amplify it.

And along the way it has nourished us.  I’m speaking of more than the garden and the orchard.  These several acres have fed more than our bodies.  It has enlarged and enriched our understanding of self, grounded our relationship to the “moreness” of creation, and humbled our assumptions surrounding our place in the world.  We are, to put it simply, simpler, and richer.  We are increasingly shed of our presumptions and pretensions – learnings, the irony of which are not lost on me this “Independence Day” weekend.  

Amidst a holiday that has come to be a self-indulgent bath in self-adjudged exceptionalism – that we, out of all the nations of the world and history, have managed to get it “right”; or at the very least, are the best among the alternatives (an argument that is at once gratuitously delusional and aspirationally pathetic) – we alternatively take a moment to admire a wildflower, pluck a wild blackberry and giggle at the burst in our mouths of its undeserved sweetness, and simply give thanks not for any possession of it, but for the generosity it unself-consciously tips our way.  

The celebration around the farmstead this weekend, then, is not about “rockets red glare” or some faux narrative about religious freedom or the trumpeting of supposed high and noble ideals.  Those, after all, are mere self-congratulatory fictions we perpetuate in order to elevate our national ego and sell more firecrackers and bottle rockets.  Having forsaken the beauty of community and the mechanics of cooperation, we collectively are left to settle for the fetish of "independence", a hollow and terminal alternative.  

Our celebration, instead, will seek to be a quiet and grateful wonder at the privilege of belonging - that we are a petal on a flower on a stem on a root in a soil that is no respecter of boundaries or borders; partners as busy contributing as receiving; speakers, but mostly listeners to the rustling, the stirring, the emerging and the blooming.  

And as darkness closes the day, "oohing" less at the fireworks in the sky than the fireflies in the field, we give


thanks that we get to be connected to - interdependent with - it all.  

Viriditas Comes Home

 The seed was sown in Italian soil, in the Umbrian village of Assisi.  We had read about a bronze sculpture in the Upper Basilica of that storied village, and nearing the end of our visit to a neighboring village six miles away, we hastily arranged an exploratory expedition.  The sculpture depicts Saint Francis receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit – a common enough theme.  But unlike the usual depictions in which Francis’ hands are extended towards the heavens to receive the descending dove, this characterization positions Francis on his knees reaching downward to receive the Holy Spirit emerging from the soil.  That made sense to us in a way so compelling that our spiritual and agricultural imaginations kept returning to the idea.

And then we met Hildegard.  

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century German polymath – an Abbess, an herbalist, a physician, an artist and musician, a blunt critic of religious leaders who grew accustomed to her scorn when she deemed their actions contrary to the gospel, a preacher, writer and mystic.  She was, in a phrase, a spiritual force of nature.  

I rather think she would smile at the label.  

Central in her writings was a special attention to the presence and activity of the Spirit in the world/nature. The Latin word she frequently used to refer to a central element in her thinking and approach to life was “viriditas” - often translated as “greening”.  As one contemporary disciple of Hildegard noted, “Viriditas was a key concept that expressed and connected the bounty of God, the fertility of nature, and especially the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

And with that, the seed sown in Italy sprouted in Germany, and blossomed in Iowa.  A friend connected us with a Belgian artist living only a few miles from us – significantly named “Hilde” – who accepted the commission for an outdoor sculpture that would integrate these two inspirations.  Click here to see more of her amazing work.

Early in the process, we sent an email to her that shared our thoughts about this intriguing Latin word, “Viriditas:  Holiness, health, vitality, nature and fertility - all wrapped up into one lovely Latin word; all central to a European mystic whose name reminded us of you.  Delightful. It could name the piece.”

And so it has.  And Viriditas came home to assume its place today on the farmstead, framed by the garden, the chicken yard and the tall grass prairie.  She’s magnificent.  With wings inspired by oak leaves and a gentle spiral evoking upward movement, the corten steel piece subtly incorporates the taproot that names our farmstead, on a base that hints at the labyrinth that highlights our acreage’s western edge.  The color of the bare metal will evolve with the elements and time, much like the farmstead itself.  

And already we gather around it, or pause as we pass; acknowledging in fresh ways that we are accompanied here in our daily work by winds exhaled from lungs holier and more instrumental than our own; evocative breezes stirring life in freshly incarnational expressions, at once grounding and elevating, centering and expanding…

…into ever-new life.

I somehow think that Hildegard is smiling at Hilde's work - singing, even - while Francis kneels and reaches toward it to receive, yet again, the Spirit that is the very creative impulse of God.  

Here.  Now.  In this very place.

The Overturning, Enlivening Breath of the Wind

 

The wind has been a wearisome neighbor this week.

Gusting and blowing, first from the north and then turning to return from the south as if to retrieve something forgotten behind.  Like keys.  Or a wallet.  As I age I increasingly know this kind of problem.  The wind, however, has been neither embarrassed nor quiet about its comings and goings.  It has blown, with gust and gale; wearying, and withering.  

The trash dumpster, emptied by the road, relented in the face of the unrelenting and toppled over on its side.  

The greenhouse door tested its hinges as the handle wrenched from my hand.  

The deck chairs slid in a patternless ballet.  

The chickens huddled in the sheltering calm of the run.  

Trees swayed like concert fans in the mosh pit.   

The prairie grasses leaned into an italicized landscape.  

Everything feels it, responds to it, succumbs to it.  However reticent, however pliant and resilient, the wind has us all, and does with us what it wills.

And then stillness, as if pausing to take a breath that, in exhalation, becomes yet another force to be pressed against.  

I don’t have explanation for why the simple experience of wind is so exhausting - how simply standing in place while the force of it presses and insists can weary.  Perhaps it is that the act of simply being suddenly requires an effort not demanded in stillness.  Neither do I understand why the alternation of its absence can feel so relieving.  But there it is:  the compelling, propelling sweep of its presence, and the centering peace of its absence.  

Or so it seems.

It has always struck me as interesting that in scripture the words “breath” and “wind” and “spirit” are all translations of the same Hebrew word.  The animating breath that brought Adam and Eve to life; the wind that drove back the Red Sea waters allowing the Israelites to safely pass through; the forceful wind that stormed into and revitalized Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones; the mind of God that Isaiah saw lacking in the people; the Spirit that gives life in the Gospel of John’s Greek translation of the word - the Comforter that Jesus promised; the Spirit that the risen Christ “breathed” on his disciples; the transformational wind of Pentecost.  

Wind, Breath, Spirit.  The compelling, propelling movement of the Divine.

Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, latched onto the Latin word “viriditas” to refer to this enlivening, animating force at work among and through us.  Typically translated as “greening”, the word signified for Hildegard that divine movement - force - that is the source of all flourishing and growth. 

 It’s easy to see this greening activity this time of year in coloring lawns and garden bed emergence.  And yes, that is viriditas.  

But emerging stems and greening grass could inure me to the truth that this inspirited movement is a force, pushing and rearranging, toppling over and breaking through.  

Like the wind.

This morning it was still when I stepped outside to perform the morning chores.  Righting the overturned glider in the yard, I lift my face to the quietude of the rising sun.  It is peaceful after the relentless bluster of recent days.  But I smile with the recollection of that old biblical word and Hildegard’s Latin equivalent, and wonder if this momentary calm is just Divine inhalation - the Creator pausing and gathering oxygen for the next billowing gust of transformational, generative, and quite possibly disrupting greening.

While Anything is Possible

The day began, crisp and sunny - sunny enough that the brightness upon the greenhouse was already blunting the crispness inside.  Stepping inside, into this wholly other world of moist and evocative fecundity, I stood for a moment once the door closed behind me to simply inhale the air of promise.  And to be encouraged by it.  Removing the lids protecting the trays we populated yesterday with seeds, I had to reassure myself that despite the naked appearances, just slightly beneath that surface of potting soil are, indeed, nestled the promissory notes of harvest - tiny packets of DNA and know-how already beginning to soften with the rainwater I sprinkle on; already stirring with the warmth and the dark; already aching to stretch upward into the light.

Just beneath the surface.

I can’t get too carried away.  I know from sobering experience that not every seed grows; not every promise is kept; not every potential grows to fruition.  Some simply smolder in their dormancy, and remain there beneath the soil -

-like words unspoken;

-notes unplayed;

-letters not mailed.

Perversely, it’s tempting to focus on them - the blank blocks in the tray - rather than those out of which a stem, tiny and fragile, is already protruding.   There is yet time.  It's still early.  Seeds, after all, exist in a time beyond my own - “kairos”, the Greek word for that intangible and inscrutable “right time”, rather than “chronos”, that metronomic click of “clock time.”  I can manage the externals - the water and warmth and light - but the internals are beyond my reach.  We might wince at the comparison, but like the gardeners who sow them, not every seed realizes its potential.  

Even then not all is lost.  The unsprouted seed simply dissolves into the soil where it becomes part of the nourishment for other seeds.  

Having tended, then, indiscriminately to both the stretching and the silent - unable at this stage to assess what is won and what is lost - I refill the water jugs for next time and latch the door behind me, stepping back into the sunny crispness of the morning.  Midway back toward the house I pause with a nagging provocation, and take another lingering look behind me and consider again the wonder of what is happening inside that nurturing space.  

Coaxing.

Nurturing.

Protecting.

Germinating.

And I ponder what all might be stirring in those other fertile spaces of these days...

...in the opportune conversations;

...on the blank pages;

...in the quiet moments;

...in the prayers of the day;

...in the seeds, just beneath the surface;

...in these moist and fecund days while anything is yet possible.

The Urgent Awakening of Now

Wendell Berry once commented about the season of deep winter as the time when, “the present has abated its urgencies” (The Long-Legged House).  

For the past ten years especially I have enjoyed that to be true.  That, in the same way that spring has come to be the season when the urgencies of the present re-engage.  

It was less than 2 weeks ago that we were yet again shoveling snow from the porch and driveway.  Five inches of heavy, wet flakes had fallen along with the temperature after an unseasonably warm week.  Even still the nights, as often as not, drop below freezing. But it is undeniable that the seasons are changing.  Warmer days are gradually arm-wrestling winter to the table despite the latter’s occasional bursts of strength.  And suddenly the tasks present themselves.  

Already we are filling seed trays and nestling them into the greenhouse.  It won’t be long until the garden soil is workable, opportunistically between the frost and the mud. There will be beds to reclaim and refresh, irrigation tapes to reestablish and realign, seed plots to allocate, and, with breathtaking speed, weeds to attack.  The rain barrels will need to be positioned and the downspouts reconfigured to feed them.  The compost will need to be spread.  The snow blower on the tractor will need to be unhitched and moved aside on behalf of the mowing deck whose labors will soon be called upon.  

And when it all commences in earnest - when it thunders toward us like an oncoming train - it will feel to us like it needs to all happen at once.  All with the urgency with which we have ached, these recent months, for spring itself.

Rabbits are already exploring the open spaces along the edge of the woods, and birds have resumed their familiar music.  

Life, in ways both airy and earthy, is stirring.  

Slowly.

Quietly.

But with startling acceleration.

And it’s good, these palpable signs of greening, given the iciness that so tenaciously grips and paralyzes the world’s relational fecundity.  We need the crocuses and daffodils and robins and buds to teach us again how to swell, fat, with vigor.  We need role models of thawing and softening and turning toward the light.  We need tutors in daily song; coaches in the calisthenics of breaking through the crusted earth and stretching upward and outward.  

We need the dangling promise of harvest, even if the ripe juice of it is still months away.

But for now it is work enough to acknowledge the shift of the equinox, and submit to its coaxing.  Just the hint of it emerging - the tiny glimpse of the green of it - is enough to get us moving...

...with the urgency it demands.

The Silence of a Sobered Morning

The local meteorologists were tracking the storm path with their usual euphoric chatter. The television was on, and then it went dark.

 

The cell phone tornado warnings alarmed in our hands, and then went silent. 

 

The air was eerily still, and then it wasn’t. 

 

The lights glowed beneath the angry sky, and then they didn’t. 

 

The generator kicked on. The chickens huddled inside their coops, not unlike us in our basement. 

 

The rains sheeted down, the winds snarled, and just beyond our reach, the tornado knifed its way through town, across the county, and then beyond.

 

And missed us.  But we were among the fortunate.  Nearby, seven people lost their lives.  I have to sit with that for a moment.  Lives.  Lost.  From a storm that passed perhaps a half-mile from our home.  We’ve since seen the power lines draping the roads; the carcasses of trees tracing the line.  We’ve since heard of horses moved from barns deprived of their roofs, businesses invaded by the elements, homes battered.  Families displaced.

 

Morning confirmed that Taproot Garden passed the night unscathed.  Not even broken branches.  We awoke to power restored, blue skies – a blank-faced, mischievous morning trying to act like it had not misbehaved in the night.  

 

I released and fed the chickens who were happy for the daylight.  I walked the dogs.  I watered the seed trays in the greenhouse and tried to pretend that this was simply another ordinary day.  But the pretense was deafened by the echo of the hollowness.  

 

I know otherwise.

I know the truth.

This is not simply another ordinary day.

 

Line crews worked through the night to retrieve dangling cables and to restore electrical service.  Road crews worked through the night to bulldoze trees off the roadways.  People picked through their rubble to reclaim the precious, the salvageable.  Insurance adjusters arrived early on the scene to begin the grim assessment of destruction.

 

And families, scissored by death, sat in silence, facing into the disbelief and the inexpressible, untraceable future.  

 

A half-mile away.

 

Anything but just another day.