Reflections for a Pandemic: From the Garden

Gardening brings many of us a sense of peace and pleasure -- not to mention the beauty and bounty gardens provide.  And gardening is a way for us to co-create with God, the first Gardener.  In Scripture, life began in a Garden -- and ever since humanity was banished from Eden, we've been trying to make our way back...

For your consideration and reflection as those of us who are planters and tenders and reapers, setting out our plots and beds and field this time of year -- in a particularly difficult time in the world -- I offer a variety of resources.

The first is an episode from the podcast "The Growing Edge", co-created by educator and author Parker Palmer and singer-song-writer Carrie Newcomer -- both Christians who've been informed by the Quaker Tradition.  The episode is called "Gardening in the Dark" and you can listen to it HERE.  

The episode includes Parker and Carrie's reflection on a poem by Marge Piercy:

The Seven of Pentacles

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 - source: Famous Poets and Poems.com

The second is a podcast entitled "The Art of Being Creatures, from On Being -- host Krista Tippett's interview with Ellen Davis, Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke University Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina -- interspersed with poetry from the farmer, poet and environmentalist, Wendell Berry.  Mr. Berry's poems, read by the author, can be listened to HERE.  (I commend to you in particular, "The Peace of Wild Things".)

And the third is a portion of the Tapestry @ 25 podcast from CBC radio, hosted by Mary Hynes.  Entitled "Back to the Garden", its Ms. Hynes' interview with Canadian gardening advisor and author, Marjorie Harris, which you can listen to HERE.

And then there are these small offerings...

God's Garden

...The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth --

One is nearer God's heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on earth.

-- An exerpt from "God's Garden", a poem by  Dorothy Frances Gurney

...We are stardust, we are golden --

And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden.

         -- from "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell

May these selections bring you a blessing this week.