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Springing into Surprise

By Emily Lardner

When the world is too much with Wendell Berry, he seeks the company of wild things. When the world is too much with me, I turn to my garden. I come from a family of expert gardeners — my sister works with community groups to plan public landscapes. My mom planted gardens with her kindergarten children every year. The father of my children is an avid seed saver. My partner grows food for our household, and the Farmers Market. People I love know a lot about plants. Not me.

I am not an expert on prayer either. Each month, I check in with my spiritual director, and each month, like clockwork, about three days before I see her, I start to get anxious. I know she will ask me whether I am making enough time for my spiritual practice. And I try. I listen wholeheartedly to birds singing as I walk along Capitol Lake in the early morning. I try to be still inside. I try to breathe in steadiness.

But I forget. I get discouraged. The evidence of calamity overwhelms me and I am swamped with grief — the fragility of all of our lives, the horrible contradictions between the material circumstances of my life and the lives of others, the grinding pressure of the "status quo" and the feeling that something is terribly wrong. Just the worry that I am not doing whatever it is I could be doing that would make a difference. In those moments, when it's hard to breathe and my head feels like it is going to burst, I need to go outside.

Working in the garden steadies me. Not for any productive reasons, but because of the miracle, the privilege, of putting my hands in living soil, of smelling green smells, of focusing wholly on where this root of buttercup will take me. In those moments, when I am actually working outside — not thinking about it, not planning, not worrying but just doing — I come close to praying.

Mary Oliver puts it like this: To pray, she writes, you just have to pay attention, and then patch a few words together — "this isn't a contest, but a doorway/into thanks, and a silence in which/another voice may speak." Christina Baldwin calls it "surrendering to surprise" — accepting the unexpected interruption, large or small, happy or terrifying. She writes, "spiritual dependability is not a one-time event, but choosing and choosing and choosing, in all the little and big surprises, to accept what is really happening."

The gift of a garden is that it invites us to accept what is really happening. No matter what I imagined when I ordered seeds, or coveted a new plant, or fretted over what would come up, the reality is what's there. I just have to go outside and look, and then, if I'm lucky, or wise, I will let myself be carried down to my knees, among the plants, ready to hear anything.

Emily Lardner is a regular contributer to the South Sound Green Pages.


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Updated 2015/01/07 21:14:22