Grown By My Garden

When earth takes a human voice it flows through the flowers of my garden. Each morning they open to bless our time together and later, they offer balm to the closing of the day. In our cycles together a potent relationship of student and teacher grows. These are a few of the lessons I have come to absorb.

These blooms are delicate, fierce, wry, and so attentive in their detail I am forced into total awareness, less I miss their life.

Our relationship speaks to me of paradox and patience, frustration and trembling anticipation.

I harvest dreams here. When I meet with failure, ‘there is always next year,’ the gardener’s mantra.

They have knighted me with stewardship; the high honor and passion of mentoring their landscape, harvesting their beauty. They offer their lives to my learning, and applaud my efforts, even my failures.

The garden teaches me scale. Running my fingers through her rich soil, I know there are more microorganisms in one cup of dirt than humans on the face of the earth. Fondling this warm life, uprooting weeds, moving earthworms from exposure, I know myself a tiny, and oh so important, microorganism indeed.

Gardens are always in motion, even under three feet of snow. They are planning, laying themselves out for future splendor and betrayal, preparing to inform me in the spring. If you are fortunate enough to live in a garden you become a lover first, and a dancer second.

In planting her seed I become the visionary of great things. On hands and knees, a true supplicant, I drop tiny black seeds, one by one into waiting earth. I envision their life. I can almost smell their grown leaves wilting under August sun. The seeds inside me are waiting to be dropped into fertile soil, imagined into being, watered and prayed over.

Like all my other Practices, gardening is here to tame me. Lke her, I am not obedient. We often rail against the hardships of changing one another’s shapes, knowing all the while that the core is sacred, and bowing is the first law.

My beloved flowers take me to my death with assurance and equanimity. Her cycles of birth and dying teach me that showing up, growing mindful, and grateful, sitting with each hour as a poem, supporting birds in song and ever stepping into the green flow of life is what offers heaven.

Asana: Go to your own garden, find a patch of grass, a tree to stand under, move into the Pose that wells up from inside, listen to Ma Nature. It don’t get much better.