The Garden Is a Mirror
I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making great time. *
Several years ago at a farmer’s market on Maui this simple yet profound sentence captivated me from the front of a t-shirt hanging in a stall across the parking lot. What was it about that line? I didn’t quite, and still don’t totally, understand its significance. It is not that I can’t grasp the concept intellectually, but that the fibers of my mind and body have been so woven together according to the agenda that society has patterned for me.
It was a couple of years before this that the illusion of that cloak began to unravel. Slowly, painfully, the laws of Nature began to reorder my life, my being. Suddenly, I didn’t recognize myself anymore. Motherhood and adulthood had descended in the blink of an eye. The hamster wheel spun endlessly as I gathered myself and my children before dawn to dispose of them with strangers while I whisked off to wade the uneasy waters of teaching literature to eleventh graders. At first there was passion and drive and a feeling of satiety. The American Dream had been achieved. Then, all of the sudden, there was only a flood of crushing overwhelm and the sense that I was earning a C-, or less, in all subjects of my life. I was a C- teacher who could earn a better grade if only there was more time for grading and feedback, connecting to students, or creating the miraculous lesson plans to engage all and send them down that track of college and career readiness. I was a C- mother whose few hours with her children each evening were spent in madness preparing dinner and lunches for the next day. Making sure there were clean socks and complete homework left me unable to care for my daughters and myself. I was a D- wife who had nothing left to give her husband at the end of the day. If I didn’t act soon, I’d be failing. I’d fall apart.
Turns out, I was there and I didn’t even know it. The bandages, duct tape, and zip tie quick fixes could no longer hold me together. Eventually, I had to acknowledge my seams had already been torn open in places. Parts of me I thought I’d know forever spilled out and, like chaff in the wind, have never been seen again. Other parts I still had, but I just couldn’t figure out how to repair them.
I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making great time.
Even after I bought that t-shirt, and observed my husband wearing it over the last couple of years, I struggled to understand its significance, the allure of those words. The patterns within struggled to see how the future was only a specter of my imagination and the only time there was, was now.
The garden had been a quiet reflection for some time, yet I had failed to interpret the images staring back at me. I had grown gardens successfully in the past, but this new garden on that new homestead was a perpetual challenge. I labored and gave hours of myself, but there was very little to harvest. For nearly five years, I was a slave to the vision of creating abundance. I had sown that expectation into my soul because then, and only then I told myself, all would be well. If I could feed the family from the garden, I’d be happy and all would be right. I don’t know what it was about gardening, but when I threw my hands in the air and asked the Universe for a sign, the only thing I heard was a whisper: grow food. I poured myself into that garden. I planted, I mulched, I watered, and I loved, but still there was little harvest. At first I could blame it on the wildlife. It was the deer, or the squirrels, or the quail. The slugs and pill bugs wreaked havoc. I told myself it would be better if we had a fence. I learned to shoot the pellet gun, but all that ever died was a garden hose. I set a handful of Gopher Hawks each day and purchased every single trap I could with an -inator in its name. After the Squirrelinator and Ratinator did their jobs, I was sure I’d get a better harvest. If only I could just throw enough energy at controlling nature, we’d eat well. We’d live well. We’d be well.
Even after I hadn’t seen a gopher or a squirrel in the garden for some time, the garden was still limping along in a state of inadequate survival. Plants grew, but they did not thrive. Vegetables sprouted and then as if from some black magic just spontaneously withered away.
It was some time before I was able to connect the state of the garden to my own internal affairs, but it turns out the garden is a mirror. If I was stressed, so was she. If I did not bubble with life, neither would she. If I did not fill my cup, hers could not overflow.
I still feel those old patterns digging at the fence lines of my soul, but now there are new fibers being woven. Only this time, there is no cloak, no cover, nothing to hide me from myself. I don’t know what exactly is being knit within, but it no longer matters what will manifest, only that it continues to unfold.
*These words were found on a t-shirt produced by Live in Wonder.
