Raking the Gardens

Last week, looking out the kitchen windows into the gardens in the backyard, I saw that what Edna St. Vincent Millay said about April is true: it had indeed come “like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” But amid that exuberant fertility I also saw the clogging mass of dead leaves that I somehow never managed to find the time to clear out back in autumn. And so, I raked.

Raking is my contribution to the ongoing garden project, begun some seven years ago by my wife Kathy. Two gardens: one large and open to the sun, featuring a dogwood, a Japanese maple, and a butterfly bush; studded with flox, wild geraniums, English roses, irises, ferns, hostas, daylilies, impatiens, liatris, and bluebells; and, for added visual interest and for its calming gurgle, a small waterfall; the other smaller, designed more as a nook of shade, a cranny of retreat under the latticed spread of a red bud tree, the space under it carpeted with vinca and filigreed with tulips, impatiens, and hostas. I do not garden myself; I can grow nothing but tired trying to grow anything. But I have two arms and a back that are still relatively strong, so I clear and neaten. I rake. I prepare the way for Kathy to transfigure these plots of earth into conformity with her aesthetic vision of them, to create a floral architecture of astonishingly beautiful living things. I enable the natural to receive the artful. Gardens are middle spaces, positioned halfway between the fecund inventiveness of nature and human ingenuity. That combination of creativities, the seeming miracle of it, motivates me to affirm it the only way I am able. I rake.

I have noticed that raking takes on the rhythm and expression of the raker’s personality. Beta rakers, in keeping with the restive churn of their minds, use short bursts of vigorous strokes. They find raking tedious, a usurpation of time that could be better spent. Their goal is to finish quickly and be about other, more important, business. Alpha rakers use slower, longer, languorous strokes. They relish raking as time well spent, as an opportunity for reflection perhaps, or for mental waywardness, for cognitive drift. Alpha rakers pay attention to what thoughts may come. They attend to what their minds are hailed by. They are mindful. I am an alpha raker.

During a recent raking, for reasons I cannot explain, and for which I seek no explanation, I suddenly thought of an article I had read some time back about feral parrots, escapees from imported shipments that formed communities of wild parrots and managed to adapt themselves to urban environments as diverse as Brooklyn, Miami, Austin, and San Francisco—bright shouts of exotic color in the otherwise drab familiarity of the cityscape. Wild creatures, torn from their native surroundings, shipped overseas to languish in cages in well-appointed rooms in tasteful houses, they refused to go gentle into that good life—for a well-appointed gulag is still a gulag--took flight, and returned themselves to the wild. I’d like to imagine some parrotudinous intentionality at work here, or perhaps some impulse-imbued psittacidae act of spirit and courage. They refused to relinquish the title to themselves. They refused surrender to an incapacity for change. I found the thought, and the urgency of feeling it signified, somehow whole and gladdening.

Likely the very rhythm of my raking, the incantatory motion of it, summoned this thought, and others like it, from their deep-brained slumber and put them in play. But whatever the reason, I consider this spillway of unrefereed, ungatekept thought an intrinsic good. I do not analyze why wild parrots came to mind. It came to mind, and I am content with that, content that it simply emerged, gestated, from some shadowy cortical annex, content to be immersed in it, content that a small mystery has arrived and unspooled itself, content with the plenitude of it, content to know that some kind of neural algorithm yielded something of me to me.

But the good of raking is less mysterious as well. My raking matters in the observable world. It is an achievement, and one of the few activities where the good of it is so immediately present in the moment of its ending. So much of what we do is of doubtful issue, is contingent or provisional, subject to variables, its effects deferred. Educating, raising children, choosing a career, donating to charity, praying—have we done well? Have we made a difference? The answer too often is not immediately apparent. Our hopes for so much of what we do seem set on a time delay. But my raking is a discernable accomplishment; I made a difference, an empirically evident difference. The garden is decluttered, restored; it is ready to be reoccupied, reworked; ready to once again floresce into an eruption of beauty.

And who knows, perhaps the order I long to restore signals a good beyond the provocation of it, a good more ineffable than the felt experience of it. Perhaps the order I desire and make, small and rather insignificant creation that I am, points beyond my littleness to a larger and more significant order, to the whole of creation itself, an ordered whole, a whole in order. Is it an emblem? Is it, in a minor key, the faint melody of a first principle? Do I dare to make such a transcendent leap? Is it a blind intuition merely, more a yearning than a concept, more a wish than an insight? I don’t know. But for now, here, at this time and in this place, the raking itself is enough.