Just now, if I stand in the backyard garden at just the right place, I can see the rubied tulips at the foot of the rose-leafed dogwood surmounted by the lavendered explosion of the red bud in the smaller “nook” garden across the yard. Just to the left, the butterfly bush is undergoing its restoration and soon will be attracting those lepidopteran flutterers that carry summer on their wings. I feel like a stranger in this sightscape, the only thing in it in physical decline, the only thing with wintriness about it, the only thing deblossoming. And yet, standing here, rooted to the earth, I somehow feel at home, as if my being here, my witnessing this small-scale epiphany, is somehow right, necessary. An act of communion. I feel as Thoreau did when he stood immersed in one foot of a rainbow: liberated from the densities of matter and gravity, swimming like a porpoise in pure color; an experience removed from instrumentality; an experience unmolested by the necessity of representation; an experience of hint and intimation and innuendo, of pure value, of meaning as meaningfulness; of self, at least for that stilled moment, as a precondition for transcendence.
In that stilled moment, I think I know what “soul” means: our capacity to recognize and acknowledge those rarefied moments when things abracadabra to a different order, take on a luminescence, demand a sustained act of mindfulness; when the drone of the quotidian becomes music; when the block letters of the everyday become calligraphy; when the eye—and through the eye, the mind and heart—is struck and simply must gaze, steadfastly and unblinkingly; when we realize, as did William Carlos Williams with the red wheelbarrow, “so much depends/upon” what we are seeing. The soul is that glistening instant when body and mind, the material and spiritual, distracted from distraction, fuse and transition beyond almostness and in-partness into the uncloistered wholeness of a being being wholly in the world.
And in that stilled moment, I think I know what “Easter” means, that movable feast set some 1700 years ago on the first Sunday subsequent to the full moon subsequent to the vernal equinox, itself a fused moment, of winter and not-winter transitioning to spring; that Christian replacement for the pagan festival of Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn, itself a fused moment of night and not-night transitioning to day; that capacious holiday, making celebrants of anyone, no matter their faith tradition, that day of basketed sweetnesses and the joyous laughter of children scurrying to discover hidden eggs, themselves emblematic of a fused moment between born and not-born transitioning into aliveness; that day of the hoped-for, the wished-upon, the expectation-imbued; that day of a risen Redeemer or simply the redemptive promise kindled by the rejuvenated earth, once more, once again, gloriously, thankfully, resurrecting itself from the cold-stoned obduracy of winter.
Showing posts with label gardens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gardens. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Monday, September 5, 2011
One Looks At One
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” the poet Theodore Roethke says. For me, a moment of seeing occurred in the pale half light just before dawn one morning toward the end of July. Waiting for the carafe of the Mr. Coffee machine to fill with just enough coffee to banish the last vestiges of drowsiness, I happened to glance out the backyard windows into the garden and saw, as if conjured from that auroral seam between night and morning, a fully-mature, antlered buck nibbling on some sedum. I knew deer were paying calls to the garden. They had left their visiting cards: cropped day lilies, gnawed hostas, and cloven, heart-shaped hoofprints. Neighbors had spoken of seeing deer in their yards, but, until this particular morning, they had been only trace presences in mine. I came to think of the hoofprints as ungulate footnotes without an accompanying cervine text.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
Friday, April 29, 2011
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.
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.
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