Everything is thriving with me having little to do with it. I pruned some spent leaves, did a little weeding, tied the rambling tomato vines, and harvested what was ready. Now begins the season of harvest. It arrived without my intervention or intention. I am only the sower not that which makes it all happen. There is great comfort in that thought. For many years I believe I was operating under the illusion that life was about me somehow making it all work. I don’t recommend that as a good personal philosophy. 🙂 The will to be like god, even if springs from ignorance and fear, creates the shame and perpetrates the false divided Self, hiding there behind the fig leaves.
One can not measure up to god. It is much too large a job. It creates anxiety. We know on a deep level when we are inadequate. But how could one be adequate when they are trying to fill god’s shoes? God makes it all grow, both plants and people. The cantaloupe is growing like wild. It is spreading out and producing the pretty yellow flowers which will soon become fruit. I can’t make them grow faster and longer by pulling on them. That would only do damage. My only influence when I play god is to slow or interrupt the growth.
Tiny little seeds were the start of all of this. Most of them look so unsubstantial, useless, common. But look at what those little things produced. Our culture in large buys plants that others have planted. They come sometimes full grown in a pot. A seed might cost a penny if you buy it but really most could be had for free if one just took the time to go get some from a neighbor’s plant. But even if the penny is spent, at the end of the season there will be hundreds of free ones on the ground just laying there. The markup on plants is thousands and thousands of a %. And we pay because we are wanting it to come full grown like a fern from Home Depot. Or again, the leaves that fall each year in my yard are the perfect fertilizer. The trees have penetrated deeply into the earth to find the minerals to make the leaves. Then each year the minerals are returned back to the earth to go round again. But what do we do so often? Rake em, burn em, then go buy fertilizer for the yard.
I was thinking about such things yesterday and how I have so often looked past the treasure, the resources I have at hand. Thinking it is too small or common and wishing for something to come full grown and done. Those kind of opportunities can be had but they typically cost too much. And one may occasionally stumble upon something just sitting out there waiting for someone to claim it. My grandmother would often take us into the woods with her to dig up plants she would later transplant in her yard. Or she would “root” a cutting of some plant and have 2 or 3 or 20. It was all free. God gives the seeds and plenty of them are laying around our feet unnoticed and unused. So yesterday I sowed some tiny seeds. They seem inconsequential but have you ever seen a tomato seed? It almost feels silly to say, so I’m guessing that I was on the right track. All I did was find the contact numbers for local poetry/literary groups and reached out. No idea what may come of it but each one is a seed sown. I then submitted some more poetry to a journal. Then I joined the Alabama Writers Forum which promotes the arts statewide. There I found some other places to submit poetry. It was not a huge deal. It is goofy not to have done those things before. The options were there the whole time. But perhaps I was waiting on something to grow in me before I could see. Perhaps the seed of being a writer has finally germinated and it sprouting. If I am going to write I need to do at least some of the stuff that writers do. Nobody is going to bring it to me pregrown. And who knows what might come up, who I may meet, idea birthed, or new pathways trod? There may be something cool that I’ve never seen or tasted. Like these.
So I think I will practice not being god. I suck at it anyway. And even though I am such a failure the impulse still persists at times. I keep forgetting that I am a part of the process not the master of it. But sometimes I remember and can relax and quit pulling on the vines. I’m not the Grower I am the Sower. I have seeds in abundance. And there is a whole universe full of soil. What comes up and thrives is out of my hands, thank god. Be Groovy! 🙂
Gardens are mysterious all right. You put a seed in the ground. Wait. And life appears. If conditions are right, you need do nothing. Interesting post!!
That’s just so we can see you better above the crowd… 🙂
Garden seeds are not all you sow… You wear some pretty special shoes, my dear. <3
Corrective ones 🙂
As usual your garden update is full of wisdom and enlightenment. I’m so enjoying just sitting back and following your running discourse. I certainly think I am one that is guilty of wanting things to come full-grown, or at least to spring up that way over night. Perhaps my garden needs thinned out a little and then I wouldn’t be in such an all fired hurry to get it growing. My tendency when I garden has always been to plant things too close together in too small a space. I think my life is the same way.
I have to be talked to often. There is a stupid silly me that must me encouraged and instructed quite often. I think everything I write is perhaps a conversation with myself.
Dear Plato: Repeat after me. I am a good gardener. The plants and worms enjoy your presence (so do we.) Repeat five times a day. 🙂
🙂 yes mam!
🙂
You are a bird dropping a seed that germinates, Plato. Does that mean that all birds are playing God? I don’t think so. So hard on yourself, because you humanly want to organize order. That is our nature, but it doesn’t seem like you want to be or try to be God. You just like food, beauty and growing things around you. You are a gardener, simple, guardian of the plot.
Good morning dear man! 🙂
Yes. I am just a gardner. And my caution to myself is not to live in the anxiety. I must remember that like the bird many of the seeds I drop are random and are coming out of my butt. 🙂 and it works anyway because of something greater than me. Much love. 🙂
Well, I was gonna leave the poop out of it, and assume they dropped the seeds from their mouths, butt (ha-ha) there’s better fertilizer that way. When I used to freak out, I dug a hole and made a compost pit. My compost pit became 4′ x4′ x’4′ deep. Calen thinks we are similar. Jumpy little birds that we are. Pondering the skies.
🙂 much love
Well there are SOME differences. You are sort of flighty, but this other one here is full of crap — sometimes. 😀
Tell me how the cantaloupe tastes when you have harvested it and had the chance to try it. 🙂 I love watching how you tend your garden, and to see the joy you get from being the sower! Have you found the connection yet, between yourself and the fruit which grows up? Have you seen yourself as a kindred of it? I have. We are all bits and pieces of All That Is! We, too are fruit!
Yes but I feel yet unripe and green in my new efforts
Beginnings are the sweet times of innocence and rebirth. It’s where you emerge, like a song from years ago, “just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, lies the seed, that with the sun’s love, in the spring, becomes the rose.” You are in that place of becoming, the rose.
Thank you for shining on me