I’ve had friends say that I could turn anything into a spiritual practice, which might or might not have been meant as the compliment I took it as. I do not easily separate “spiritual” from “ordinary.” We don’t have spiritual portions of our lives and other portions, rather our lives are lived fully as creatures and whatever more than flesh that you want to call us (spirit, soul, thought, or whatever works for you.)
I grew up with a garden, though at the time I loathed it. It was a 1/4 acre of vegetables that invariably meant work out in the hot sun when I wanted to be doing something fun instead. So it came as a surprise to both my parents and me when, as an adult, I discovered a love of gardening.
I don’t grow vegetables, but flowers and I’m probably more blasé about weeds than my Mother would like but it didn’t take me that long to realize that gardening was an important connection to the natural world.
For the purposes of this article gardening could be pots on an apartment balcony or a mini farm in the country. The size and scope of the garden isn’t important, nor is what sort of garden it is. From messy cottage gardens, to formal rose gardens, kitchen herb gardens and everything in between.
First and foremost a garden is one of those few practices that allows us to see both immediate results and long term growth (literally and figuratively) as the result of our labor; and as a result of absolutely nothing we could do.
When you stick a seed or plant in the earth your ability to control that living thing’s fate mostly ends. Yes you can water, prune, and fertilize but the long and short of it is seeds sprout, plants grow, without our say so. Being a gardening means spending hours weeding and being able to see immediately the difference you have made. It also means planting a seed and walking away in hope.
Totally outside the supernatural side of spiritual practice part of what makes a spiritual practice spiritual for me is that in it I encounter that which is other, that which I cannot control but can hope to be in relationship with. I cannot control much of the natural world, but I can be in relationship with this place I live. I can tend a garden that excludes or welcomes wildlife, that improves and enriches the soil, that shelters native plants, that helps me grow closer and more familiar with my home.
When we leave behind our climate controlled homes and get down on our knees (or whatever posture you can assume) in the dirt and get our hands into the soil we change our relationship to that place we call home. We are immersed in our creatureliness, in the truth that we are part of something so much greater than ourselves.
In the early 2000s I bought a little old carpenter gothic house in Lapeer, Michigan. It sat on a huge double lot. Mostly it was lawn, with a few garden beds around the house all of which were covered in a thin layer of bark mulch over black landscaping plastic. Nothing grew in them.
But tucked into the back corner of the yard was an enormous antique rose bush that the neighbors claimed had been planted by the original owners in the 1800s. My first spring it drew a gallon of blood from me, but it also gave me thousands upon thousands of huge pink flowers packed with petals; and perfumes the whole neighborhood with fragrance.
To say I was in love would be putting things lightly. I became a gardener. But it was a long and painful slog to have a garden. I learned immediately that covering soil with plastic and walking away bad things. The soil beneath that plastic was completely devoid of moisture and hard as cement. I spent years ripping out the plastic and letting the soil breathe, letting moisture and my shovel slowly break up the rock hard soil.
Hardy plants, old garden roses, antique hydrangeas went in first and those blessed friends sent roots through soil like rock. I mulched and mulched and chipped away and slowly, together we transformed rock hard soil into healthy soft loam full of moisture, networked with beneficial fungus, and where everything I stuck into the ground flourished.
But I didn’t do it alone, that ancient rose showed me the way, the soil at her feet was still soft and workable (if you braved the thorns). She showed me how I could use her sisters to begin to change the soil, that weeds weren’t the enemy, sterility was. Neither were the thorns my enemy, my hurry was.
Caring for a garden (and being fed on beauty and fruit from it) has reminded me in a physical way how rooted I am in this world my tradition likes to denigrate and be suspicious of. Gardening is good corrective spiritual practice for those cultural teachings that would divorce us from the physical, that would tell us that the created world is bad, or would try to convince us we somehow do not need the plants and creatures that exist around us.
Gardening can be a powerful way to encounter the fullness of yourself as both a fleshy creature and more than, as a creature that also sees and appreciates beauty, that makes choices for the good of others, and that can cooperate with beings that aren’t even your same species.
For that alone gardening meets the requirements for an important spiritual practice. So say you all? Are you a gardener? Is it a practical thing for you or one that touches on the spiritual? Does it contribute to your well being? Does it help you get to know the place you live better?
