Playing in the Dirt

These past weeks of social distancing have been a great time to garden. Without the distraction of being able to go out to restaurants and get together with others in person, there has been more time than usual to play in the dirt.

I have recently begun to suspect that there may be a genetic urge to dig in the soil as my grandson, at fourteen months old, can easily spend ten or fifteen minutes sitting down digging with his hands in the dirt. He clearly has his own wordless purposes and fascination with his activity. But from the outside, it looks like he is just picking up dirt from one place and letting it drop somewhere else. Already a gardener!

Though the weather of the past few weeks has been quite variable, I have been outside in the gardens of Boundless Way Temple most days. When the weather is good, I’ll spend an hour or two relocating various perennials or clearing out the winter debris or tending the various paths and beds. When the rain (or snow!) comes, I may just take a quick inspection tour to see what’s new and emerging. There’s always something to see and something to do.

I have a dear friend who is a ‘completest’, she gets great satisfaction from a kind of thoroughness and being able to check things off his list. I, on the other hand, tend to be an 80% kind of guy. I like to get most of the task done and then I’m on to the next project. I don’t have real ‘todo’ lists as much as I have lists of projects I want to work on. Her style can drive me nuts, but I like to do projects with her because things really get done. But my style works well in a large garden where the tasks are endless.

I suppose that’s one of the great appeals to me of caring for a garden. There’s always something that needs to be done—there’s always some way to be useful. Caring for the garden helps me feel like I am part of something greater than me. As long as I don’t think I’m ever going to finish, it gives me a ongoing purpose and sense of connecting to life itself.

In the garden, I am intimately engaged with the forces of growth and decay that have their own unstoppable momentum. In recent years, I have been more appreciative of the generative necessity of decay as part of the cycle of life/death that is the garden. Decomposition is what turns last year’s dead plant matter into useable form for these year’s plants to use for their renewed purposes.

Decay is an integral part of life. The microbes and fungi and tiny bugs and worms that break down the old branches and leaves and flowers are part what makes life possible. Without these lively beings who happily go about their own silent purposes, there would be no room for new life and nothing to nourish the next generation.

Even as I look from my morning chair to the miracle of my trays of sprouted seeds eagerly awaiting their time to be out in the real sun, I appreciate the liveliness of the garden as it already is. And I’m looking forward to going out in today’s rain to check up on the rising and the falling of the cool green life I call the Temple Garden in spring.