Listen as the garden teaches

Lilah, pictured above, oversees the garden as the temperature climbs towards 90 degrees.  She appears to be sleeping, but listens as the garden teaches.

It’s not that unusual for us to go from blustery, gray, chill and damp directly to summer. But this year the perennials are more confused than usual. A feast for the eyes and soul, a grand allergy provocation (all those grass and tree pollens.) The sixty-foot Linden tree that anchors our property and shades the house is barely budding. Yet blooming all at once, we have, left to right:

Row 1 Jack-in-the Pulpit, Goldenseal, Solomon’s Seal

Row 2: Pulsatilla, Dwarf Comfrey, Greater Celandine

Row 3: Senencio,  Cramp Bark, Apple

Row 4: Lenten Rose, Horny Goat’s Weed, Tiarella

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We began populating our city lot with perennials and medicinals several decades ago.

In 2009 we studied how the water ran, the sun moved, the winds blew, the soil clumped or didn’t – and began applying permaculture principles. We dug up and sheet-mulched vast swaths of lawn and added medicinal trees and shrubs: Fringetree, Vitex, Witch Hazel. We put a bamboo-management plan in place. We added a couple of apple trees and a fig to the venerable grapevines planted by an earlier owner. We’ve drawn back the no-longer common swallowtail caterpillars and gold-finches. The neighborhood fox. And many curious neighbors.

Some plants have flourished, some are just hanging on, many others  did not survive.

The garden teaches

1.  Not everything blooms where it is planted.

2. Not everything blooms.

3. Living things do not mature at the same rate.

4. Some parts of the same living thing may mature while other parts remain stunted.

5. It is wise to feed the roots.

6. A tree shaped by storm damage (aka Life) is no less beautiful than before.

A Tale of Two City Neighbors and a Blizzard

Practice is the snow-cover that softens the landscape of our humanness.

A post-storm moment of practice in which I am reminded how important it is to know, as neighbors, both who I aspire to be and who I do not want to be.

 

Two feet of snow covered our car
Winter Storm Jonas

The morning after Winter Storm Jonas dropped 24” of snow on my neighborhood, I was on my third round of shoveling, my husband Gideon and I working in shifts to dig out his car. The sun was out, the snowfall pristine, everything sparkling. I was warmed up from an hour’s worth of effort, focusing on one shovelful at a time.

Exhibit, Neighbor A: a lean young guy in electric blue skin-tight running clothes trots past down the middle of the freshly plowed street, looks back and calls over his shoulder, “Having fun yet?”

Until he said that, I would have said, Yes, I am. Not fun in the way he meant, but I had been absorbed, in the zone. I found myself staring after him and said to myself, Well, F.U. And then I jabbed at the snowpile with more ferocity than needed.

Exhibit, Neighbor B, an hour later: A guy walks by with his son, shovels over their shoulders, and asks how I’m doing, could I use some help? Sure could, you guys for hire? “No,” Dad replies. “We’re on our way to Stephanie’s (a gardening buddy of mine who lives around the corner) to help her dig out her car. We’ll stop by on our way back, see how you’re doing, see what we can do.” Then we introduced ourselves.

By the time they returned, I was inside dosing myself with Arnica to avoid muscle soreness, and Gideon was out shoveling. The three of them, working together, dug his car out in a bit over an hour.

Without them, it would have been another day’s worth of shoveling for us.

This is the kind of neighbor, the kind of human being I want to be: Don’t even need to know your name to see you need some help and offer what I can.

But without Neighbor A, I wouldn’t have had the chance to wake up just a tad, to pull myself up short, to recognize (again) how a small thing, a few words, has an impact for good or ill.

Or to see myself as Neighbor A: I don’t have to reach so far for a few sarcastic words, or to treat someone to a flippant, smart-ass comment. A good reminder of what I can inflict without thinking.  And then – give us both a moment of grace for being human!

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I’ve learned really just in the past year how important it is to be able to say not only who I yearn to be, but to say just as clearly: this is who I do not want to be. This is who I no longer want to be. And then: I offer them both a cuppa tea, encourage them to talk to one another, bring those parts of myself into relationship.

Practice is the snow-cover that softens, rounds, and brings a glistening to the landscape of our humanness.

 

Which Neighborly and Unneighborly parts of yourself might you invite for coffee, tea, a good glass of wine or craft beer, for some good conversation and relationship-building?