Life as a Garden

September 23 2012
by H. B. Cavalcanti

All preaching is an exercise in metaphorical analysis. We compare things similar in some ways but dissimilar in others; hoping that in sorting out the differences we may derive some insight and wisdom for the journey.

This morning, I want to invite you look at your life as a garden. Clearly, this comparison has clear limitations – our lives are far more important than a small patch of land. But there are parallels too intriguing for us to pass up on such interesting exercise.

Think, for instance, of the seasonal nature of both lives and gardens. Think of the labor and craft that is involved in creating meaningful patterns out of sheer wild growth. Think about the transforming qualities that cultivating a plot bring into our lives; or the deep satisfaction in engaging in a fulfilling practice.

I believe that metaphorical analysis counterbalances our Western ways. As heirs of the Enlightenment, we are prone to dwell on rationality. We tend to use reason to study things. By taking them apart and deductively putting them back together we measure evidence, explain variations, find correlations in their interactions. Rationality allows us to replicate other people’s experiments, to test reality for what it is…

Obviously, this kind of rationality has served us well on a good number of fields (mine included). It has launched both industrial and informational revolutions. It has greatly improved the way we produce goods and services. It has created efficient and effective labor-saving devices for home and work. And it has organized urban life on unbelievable scale – from highway traffic to electric grids to health care to waste and water treatment.

Rationality follows a predictable pattern – it is linear, it sequences events, it tests hypotheses in a fastidious and careful way. Thus, it allows us to organize the rhythms of our everyday life in an orderly sequence that has provided us with great comfort and much progress.

But sometimes there is benefit in exercising a different mode of thinking. Rationality may organize our lives, but not its meaning. It may provide domestic comfort, but not the reasons for living the way we choose. It might make our lives predictable and stable, but fail to protect us from natural, emotional and social upsets.

So when it comes to spirituality, to finding wisdom for the living of our days, or compassion for others and for our planet, I suggest that we might benefit from other modes of approaching reality.

Take your life, for instance. People in the West tend to think of life a trajectory, a journey, with a beginning and an ending. So if we arrange the “in-between” events carefully, we might achieve a positive progression, a sense that we are moving well from point “A” to point “B.”

But this approach turns life into a race, one where each of us is given a scorecard and the goal is to run the journey scoring as many points as possible, however we may define those points. So, if your points are related to getting friends, for example, you may spend a life time collecting them, and yet failing to focus on the quality of those friendships.

If the points are related to career success, you may spend a life time engaged in resume-building, but missing the opportunity to see work as a unique carving tool with which to sculpt your character.

We spend our lives jumping through hoops in the hopes of moving forward – from grade school to middle school; from middle school to high school and college; from job to job… But with each jump, with each point tallied up on the scorecard, we just get closer to the end of the game. Depressing isn’t it?

So, this morning, let me argue for a different way to frame lives. Consider, then, the Eastern approach. In 2003, Dr. Robert Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, published a fascinating book – The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. Nisbett’s book shows that people from different cultures don’t just have different beliefs, but different ways of perceiving the world, of reasoning about it.

When Japanese and American students were presented with the same aquarium, the Americans – using rationality – immediately focused first on the foreground – on the fish (presumably the point of having an aquarium). The Japanese students, on the other hand, focused first on the background.

As a result, the Japanese made 70% more statements about the background than the American students did. And they proffered 100% more statements about the relationships between the fish and the environment (like a big fish swimming past some particular gray seaweed).

The Japanese students looked for composition – for balance, for harmony. The American students took the scene apart, and proceeded to focus only what they thought were its important details.

Now, suppose you have been living your life that way – taking it apart and focusing only on its important details. Have you missed much?

This morning let me invite you to take the Japanese approach instead. Do not look at your life as a linear, sequential journey. Think rather of it as a garden, a composite of multiple patches. Luckily, we have help from Marge Piercy to do this exercise (one of the best poets of our generation, in my opinion).

One of the advantages of looking at your life as a garden is that it debunks the silly notion that you are always on the driver’s seat, always in control. Every good gardener knows that no one can control a real garden: there are rough spots where nothing grows… then places that are virtual magnets for weeds… and rocky patches that just sit there…

The areas you can control may look quite pretty, but that illusion of control can be easily challenged. Not everything that you plant grows as expected; not all the flowers turn out as pretty or as colorful as the pictures on the seed packets.

A garden, much like our lives, is a messy endeavor. You work on it all your life, with no guarantees that it will look exactly the way you wish. On the other hand, if you focus on the whole composition, you might come to discover that your life offers a lovely balance…

You might come to discover that looking at life as a garden is a blessing. When I look at my life that way I realize there are rough patches I simply cannot fix. There are parts of me that are never going to be lovable. And the sooner I learn that, the sooner I can figure out ways of balancing those parts with something else in the garden (like being funny!).

Then there are patches I wish I could shape in other ways, but frankly – they are what they are! And the folks who grow to appreciate my garden have to enjoy those patches as they come.

Nevertheless, every now and then, stuff blooms and grows beautiful in certain areas of my life. I wish I could claim full credit for it. Some of it may have been my own effort, but a good chunk of it was chance. Let’s face it, flowers need more than human tending to reach their full beauty – rain, wind, plenty of sunlight, soil nutrients and so on.

So think of your life as a garden. What would Marge Piercy teach us about gardens?

I believe her first lesson would be that gardens are not spontaneous creations. Gardens do not spring up from the earth ready-made. They require a lot of work, a lot of discipline, and they take time to shape up:

“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.”

Second, gardens, like lives, require regular tending. You can live a rational life on the automatic pilot, but you cannot cultivate a garden that way. Attention is at the heart of gardening:

“If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds with 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.”

Third, life is more than the sum of its important foreground details. Learn to mind the small, apparently insignificant things; the stuff that you usually take for granted; the stuff that adds harmony to the whole thing.

Fourth, above all, be patient. Believe it or not, your life is spreading out, even when you think it is not:

“Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening. More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.”

Fifth, be mindful of the whole composition. Even the rough, dark, unruly patches of your life are part of the larger plan. You may not think so, and you may not notice them. But those patches sustain and support the more visible, interesting and attractive aspects of your life:

“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses; live a life you can endure: make love that is loving; keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in; a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.”                     

And finally, remember that gardening requires acceptance of what is there. Perhaps you may have wished for a more interesting, a more intriguing or exuberant life. Or you may think you have failed to make the most of the one you were given. If so, here is what Piercy says to you this morning:

“Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.”

The garden we are given to play with is the same from birth to grave. But, oh, the wondrous seasons we may have if we are wise enough!  

“This is how we are going to live for a long time. Not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.”

The beauty of this is that when you switch from “life as journey” to “life as a garden” you can afford to work on certain areas of your garden at different times and different seasons. No pattern needs repeating, no form needs to be permanent. There is room for wonderful, creative, small-scale reinventions; for changes that add much to the overall look, to the overall composition.

So my prayer for you this morning is that your garden continue to replenish you with much meaning; that you continue to “weave real connections, to create real nodes, to build real houses;” that you “live a life you can endure; that you make love that is loving;” that you “keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in.”

Forget the scorecard, forget going from point “A” to point “B” in the most efficient of ways. Focus instead on the quality of your rare, unique living. Focus on maximizing the joy this little plot of land brings to you.

Trust me, energy spent on impressing others, or being important, on keeping a busy scorecard detracts from the real living needed to create wonderful lairs and live thicket – the kind of living that makes the garden of your life truly your home.

Amen.

The Seven of Pentacles
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.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking at what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

William Henry Channing:

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
To live content with small means;
to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard;
to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow through the common – this is my symphony.