The Garden (earth and Earth)

Addendum #20

My wife and I have gardened for over fifty years – flowers, vegetables, shrubs, fruit trees, berries, ferns. I can’t imagine living without gardening. I realize that many people live just fine without literally getting into the earth but I literally need that feeling of being with the soil and being with plants. If you asked me what ails humankind, I’d say that alienation from the earth as soil, from the earth as the life force, from the earth as the fecund female principle, from the earth as deep Eros celebrated by poets such as D. H. Lawrence, from the earth as the receiver of the cycle of each year, from the earth as the home of endless little deaths, and from the earth as the sum of geological time that dwarfs any mental capacity. I need all that anaphora about the earth. It has located me in a world in which location has been a grave challenge. I could capitalize, too, to salute the planetary sense but right here in this paragraph I am concerned with the soil, the stuff I stick my hands in and the stuff I have been building in various locations over those years. Though soil seems below daily notice as mere dirt, I have always felt that soil is magic, just the way photosynthesis is magic. That we take such magic for granted is one more sign of our terrible conceit.

Gardening is a definite amount of work – tending to the health of the soil, planting, weeding, moving plants around, dividing plants, thinning, pruning. I’ve always wondered about paradise in that regard. It seemed that work already was part of life in Eden but maybe it’s only that such a paradise is hard to envision. As it is, I consider each garden my wife and I have made, for they have all been gardens we created and not that we inherited, a paradise of sorts, a testament to how wrong the legend is and how destructive the legend has been. We still live in the great sustaining garden that is the capitalized Earth. We wouldn’t be here if it were not for that on-going green magic, all that quiet growth. To say we were exiled is, alas, a lie, a rationalization of our self-love and fear of death.

That’s not to say the legend of Eden doesn’t make sense. On the contrary, it makes brilliant sense, particularly since it involves the consuming of knowledge, a stuff that the human race has never known what to do with beyond wanting more of it. The legend tells us who we are in that we sense the magic of the Earth. We once were children captivated by the Earth. To see a child watch a butterfly or a bee on a flower or a cow grazing in a pasture is to recall the rapture that the Romantic poets, rightly, made a fuss over. They sensed how the tide, via industrialism, was turning against the Earth. They sensed that the religion in which they had been raised was doing a disservice to the Earth. They sensed the vulnerability that resided in the massive strength that connected people with the Earth. They sensed there was more to the human story than humans. They sensed that civilization is as much a wound as it is a mainstay. My verb is intentional. They reveled in the gift of their senses, the way any human should revel.

Through the garden I have gotten to live with the life of each year. I have not kept a journal, though my wife, who is the designer of the gardens, has kept a plan of each of the gardens we have created. I am content with the oblivion that is part of the genius of abundance. For it is abundance that Nature teaches us and for which the garden is a stand-in of sorts, a representation we create that is ephemeral and all the richer for that ephemeral quality. The legend of Eden tells us that humankind has never known what to do with abundance, or at least certain members of humankind who have preferred salvation to life on Earth. The incredible abundance places us in the position of dependency, which is, indeed, our true position, however much some people want to live on Mars. We are, as various Native peoples have stressed, children of the Earth, hence the drive to placate the spirits of the Earth and to commune with those spirits, to enter into the realm of the Earth’s magic, a magic that doctrinal religion puts at a distance. That distance is part of the genius of doctrinal religion, since it tells us a consoling story but also allows us to treat the Earth as a possession and “resource” and, thus, something that can be made into money.

I would seem to have wandered from the realm of slugs, zinnias, compost, and cherry tomatoes. I would say, however, that the beauty of the gardens we have created over the years speaks to an elemental need that stubbornly contends with the rule of money values and the commodious heaven that has allowed for that rule. Humankind has always been able to take the Earth for granted and go about its gad-about and often destructive ways. Not so now, at least as far as our continuing life as a species is concerned. Many of us are too well-acquainted with that dire note, but what is typically missing as we search for “solutions” is the inherent celebration that goes with the garden and with living on Earth. Each day on Earth is nothing if not magnificent, as is every vegetable, fruit, and living creature. I do not exclude those slugs that have harassed our peppers this summer nor the skunks that dig up the plants we have transplanted in their keen search for the candy of organic fertilizer.

Life as a continual celebration seems impossible. Outside of the gates of Eden work reigns, which, according to the sign placed above the gates of Auschwitz by cynical, ideological maniacs, makes us free. The magic, however, resides, and our lives remain, as Pablo Neruda put it, a “residence on earth.” All the heady constructs of doctrine and ideology do nothing so much as constrict us. Whether we accept it or not, the abundance is the true freedom. It doesn’t care for humankind, however, and maybe that is why we can’t forgive it.