Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

gardening

Abundance

I’ve been avoiding the garden.

It is overgrown and overwhelming and even though the red tomatoes have tempted me, I’ve continued to make the excuse, “Not today.”

The last time I was in the garden, something moved in the weeds, and I startled, afraid of a snake/gopher/opossum/rabid squirrel attacking me in my own garden. (When my husband identified rabbit droppings, my fears were somewhat calmed but then I imagined accidentally stepping on a bunny or worse, disturbing a nest of babies. I have since seen the bunny outside of the garden, still I will not go in it.)

Besides, it is October, even though it feels like June. Humid mornings that linger through the day just enough to make life uncomfortable. I always think October is optimistic to still be harvesting from the garden.

Aren’t gardens a summer thing? I ask myself every fall.

There is also the problem of time and energy. I tell the children that in the summer I can handle taking care of them and the garden/porch plants but when school starts, I have to exchange one of those things for the students at my job and since I would not neglect my children, it is the garden that suffers from my inattention.

But one day this week I stepped outside with a bowl and scissors, thinking I could just reach over the fence for whatever tomatoes might still be edible. I was not hopeful that there would be any harvest at all because, I thought, I deserve to come up empty-handed after letting so much of our garden rot on the vine.

Guilt over the abandoned abundance followed me to the garden and with each soft and rotten tomato I snipped off the vine, my spirits sagged as well. So much waste. How could I let so much of it go to waste?

I focused my attention on what could be salvaged from the safety of outside the garden perimeter. I did not feel like traipsing through the weeds or stepping on rotten veggies or finding a pile of rabbit droppings on the bottom of my shoes. I reached and tugged and snipped.

And this is what I took inside.

It is not a lot by summer standards, but it is more than I expected. The summer growing season was so weird this year that some weeks we pulled less than this out of the garden.

Apparently, we are not finished with the garden yet. Nor is it finished with us.

—

I have this same expectation in my approach to God.

He is always there, like the garden in my backyard, but my faith feels a little overgrown and overwhelming these days. It is a tangled mess of weeds and fruitful vines and picking my way through seems like an effort I can’t make right now. I glance that way from time to time, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on other days, and I think about the good fruit that awaits.

Photo by Kevin Fitzgerald on Unsplash

Still, I often say, “Not today.”

And yet when I do venture in the vicinity of my spiritual life, what I find is as surprising as a bowl of ripe tomatoes: there is still fruit and it is abundant.

I used to believe that spirituality was transactional, an exchange, like a sale at a store or a deposit at the bank. What I put in is what I would get out of it and if I didn’t put anything in, I wouldn’t get anything out. Maybe this was based on a parable about talents or maybe it was just what I heard when faith was talked about. Deposit your time and tithe in spiritual things and you will harvest more than what you put in.

There is some truth to this as there is with the garden. If I had been picking the tomatoes for the last few weeks now I would have more usable ones than rotten ones. And it is true that the practice of my beliefs increases the richness of my spiritual life. But it is also true that we do not control the abundance merely by effort.

I do not believe that my soul withers and dies when I neglect the tending of it, that it suddenly rots and there is nothing usable left. If God can turn even a mustard seed into a gigantic tree then even the smallest measure of faith can still grow into something beautiful.

God draws me toward Him like ripe fruit dangling from the vine, and when I finally decide I cannot ignore it or Him anymore, I find myself overwhelmed by an abundance. Of grace. Of love. Of fruit I don’t think I deserve.

All this to say that neglecting your spiritual life or abandoning it for a time does not disqualify you from receiving an abundance of good things. In a story Jesus told about a father and two sons, the son who left and took everything he was owed with him, the one who squandered it all and returned home penniless and ashamed, that same one was the guest of honor at an extravagant banquet. His father lavished him with love.

Our Father does the same.

 

The tending

These summer days are both too long and too short.

Day breaks before I’m ready to get out of bed, and yet there is something about the light that calls me to wake.

Some days, I answer, shuffling to the coffee pot, glancing across the lawn to the garden in all its green goodness. As the machine perks the beans, I survey the world. What has changed while I’ve slept? 

Usually, little.

Other days, I ignore, silencing the alarm, pulling the sheets tighter and closer, enjoying the respite the air-conditioned bedroom provides from the blistering heat of summer days. I will close my eyes to grab a few more minutes of sleep or reach for a book to open the day with words. Some days, I reach for my phone and survey the virtual world. What has changed while I’ve slept?

Usually, little.

—

On the hottest of these summer days, I have taken great care with the plants. While the children play their make-believe games all throughout the house, I am carrying water in the teapot-shaped vessel from the sink to the porch and back again. Sometimes this is a morning activity and sometimes a nighttime one. Some days, it has been both.

I am no green thumb, but I am managing to keep seven pots of herbs thriving as well as six potted flowers, one hanging plant and four succulents. This is in addition to the garden in the back yard, the watermelon seeds the kids started at a science open house that have now become vines, and a patch of petunias my husband brought home from work.

A few of the plants on my porch

So much of this is ridiculous to me. I used to joke that I had a black thumb, that I could not keep plants alive because they couldn’t speak to me. Give me a cat that meows when it’s hungry or a baby who cries when she needs something, then I can respond. 

Plants take a special kind of care—a noticing and paying attention that I didn’t have the energy for until recently. And, if I’m honest, they do speak in their own way. Dry soil. Droopy leaves. If I look closely enough I can tell when a plant is healthy and when it is not.

When we decided to start gardening for ourselves a few years ago, I was afraid of failing at it. I didn’t want to waste time or money trying to grow something that I could easily buy from someone else. Mostly, I was afraid of my own inadequacies. What if I didn’t water enough? What if I watered too much? What if these plants died on my watch?

I’m no longer afraid of these questions. There is an element of mystery to tending these plants. My part is so minimal. Not unimportant but only part of something bigger. Knowing my role has given me freedom.

—

A month or so ago, after our garden was planted, my husband brought home a bunch of daisies that were destined for the garbage at work. (He is employed by farmers who run two farm stands in our county.) They were wilted some and a few of the buds were brown, but he was convinced that with a little care, they would perk back up.

The kids and I gave each plant its own pot and surrounded it with soil. Then I watered and watered and watered some more, each day wondering if I was performing an impossible task. The leaves were a healthy green and only an up-close examination revealed some flower potential within. These seemingly dead plants eventually bloomed, adorning our porch with pink and yellow daisies. 

Even now, after weeks of hot temperatures and insufficient watering, they persist. I keep watering and wondering. Will they bloom more or am I watering for nothing?

—

A week or so ago, my husband brought home a flat of petunias that were going to be discarded. Having seen the success with the daisies, he was certain I could bring them back to life. As I prepared a plot for them, I shook my head in disbelief. Me? Bring dead things to life?

The day I transplanted the petunias

It is nothing short of a miracle.

The same petunias three days later

That same night, he brought three more plants for our garden. I made room for them as best I could, but it’s getting a bit crowded back there. We seem to be in a phase of rescuing plants that need a good home, and while it means more work, it also means potentially more beauty, more fruit.

How did I become this kind of person? Maybe I always was but fear got in the way.

These long summer days find me tending plants in the morning and watering the garden at night, preserving herbs, and harvesting vegetables as they come. I hover in the garden, keeping watch daily because the changes happen so quickly. What has changed in the night? A lot.

It is hard, holy work, this tending of plants. My hands bear hard callouses. My feet are constantly covered in dirt. My body reeks of sweat. And I never feel closer to God than when I’m close to the earth. Bare feet on dirt or sand or dipped in the ocean. Hands digging in the soil. The sounds of birds singing or leaves rustling in the wind. The colors of flowers. The green of grass.

Even in the rhythm of the near-nightly ritual of watering the garden, I can feel something of the Divine as I drag the hoses—one across the driveway, the other across the lawn—to meet in the yard so water can flow freely from the faucet by the house to the sprinkler in the garden.

I watch where the water falls, adjusting the sprinkler as necessary, never getting it quite right but hoping that the drops fall where they are needed most. I walk away for 30 minutes or so, leaving it be until puddles form in the dirt.

On the nights it rains, I celebrate the natural soaking our plants receive knowing it is far more thorough than my evening attempts to give the plants what they need.

I cannot keep up with removing the weeds but somehow life emerges. Already, we have eaten okra, eggplant and zucchini from our garden. Our first jar of pickles is in the fridge. (We still have to wait a week before they’re ready.)

The heat, the weeds—they almost made me lose faith that our garden would produce this year.

But the little signs of life help me believe.

—

I give up too easily on the seemingly dead areas of my life—dreams that dry up and plans that face too much heat, the place where I’m planted that seems overrun with weeds.

These wilted flowers and almost-discarded plants remind me that what looks to be dead isn’t always over and done. Maybe my dreams need a little watering. Maybe they need more room to grow. Maybe I can’t keep the heat away, but I can nurture my plans in another way. Maybe I need to get rid of some weeds.

Maybe I can’t give up on things just because of what I see. Maybe I need to trust the natural rhythms, the ordinary work to produce something surprising and unexpected.

And maybe the God who can bring the dead back to life can resurrect something in me.