12.13.15
Reflection given on the occasion of honoring our UU Garden and Grow program
Emmy told me gardens are all about relationships: the relationship between people and plants, and between people and people.
In my four months here, I have been watching the wonderful relationship this church has with our new gardens – only a year old – and the work of our dedicated volunteers to maintain the gardens.
I have been thinking about gardening as a metaphor for the work we are called to do in the world. Listen to the first stanza of this poem by Marge Piercy.
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Ms. Piercy talks in this poem about the real work we must do to make a garden grow: tending, mulching, watering, picking off caterpillars…
To make the world good, there is much work before us that we must do.
But as Ms. Piercy reminds us, not everything is under our control …
She uses the phrases: “if the sun shines,” “if the praying mantis comes,” and that they will flourish “at their own internal clock.”
Some of gardening is about leaving room for nature to do its own thing. Especially with xeriscaping – the more natural, environmentally friendly kind of gardening we mostly practice in these gardens. Xeriscaping involves working closely with the land, the seasons, the climate.
Nature does its own work. As poet Dylan Thomas wrote, there is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
In gardening, as in life, we do what we can, and then we surrender to forces beyond our control.
Some of us believe there is a benevolent force for good in the world – whether we call it God, Goddess, Spirit, or the Universe; some of us believe that force for good is up to us – up to the work of human hands and human hearts. Some of us think it is both. Some of us – maybe most of us – are not sure.
Whatever our belief, it is clear that we as individuals are not in complete control, and yet we must do something. It is a paradox that Gandhi described quite well: “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
Similarly, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:
Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. …It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.
So, the work we do to care for the interdependent web, we must do out of hope – not the kind of hope that is limited to our own control, our own work, our own vision, but the kind of hope that is harnessed to a power beyond our own – whether that power be nature and science, a benevolent God, the good of humanity – or all of the above.
Let us do our good work with great hope.
-Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon