Winter Gardening

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.     ~ Dorothy Day

The winter rains have found us. After three years of enduring dryness that seemed to turn every stem and leaf a sickly sort of brown, that sucked all semblance of moisture from the soil, that caused many a farmer and gardener sleepless nights and wrought furrows in brows deeper than those in fields, we are gurgling in winter wetness. Sodden sandbags stand guard at entryways, bracing for the next downpour. Water eddies and pools amidst the obstacles posed by leaf matter and soil runoff. And Mother Nature sports a hundred shades of green  - tiny blades of grass appear where before was barren earth. New growth gleams brightly on meadows and hillsides. The deer and coyotes are abandoning survival backyard picnicking for their preferred wild foraging. Even winged creatures seem to have a new lightness to their flight, relieved by the languor of dry, desolate days that had turned meals to tasteless morsels, cozy bedding to prickly, poking furniture unfit for even the grumpiest of visitors.

Abundance is a word befitting harvest time or, in this precious Mediterranean climate, the height of summer rather than the dead of winter. Yet Mother Nature laughingly shrugs at the calendar. “Now!” she seems to say, with glinted eye, “Abundance cannot be hemmed in by season or custom. Always is the time for new growth and rich harvest.”

Her wisdom is legendary. I’m trying to take it to heart.  

Dorothy Day’s words guide my heart’s musings and my heart’s homework, especially in these weeks when shameful acts of injustice, violence, unfathomable cruelty, and mind-numbing irresponsibility grab headlines. Rather than dwell on what inevitably springs from these – “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence . . .”, MLK observed – I prefer to invest in sowing the seeds of nonviolent speech, considerate and compassionate action, words  and actions that repair and renew so that they may be fed by these winter rains and multiply a thousand-fold.

Dr. King went on to counsel, “We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.” Nature has shown me how rainwater has the capacity to re-new – to make new again – and to re-generate – to join tiny seeds and lifeless and struggling plants and animals to the life force that so essentially nourishes them so that they might experience vitality and abundance.

It’s hardly the season for sowing, though I know many a diligent farmer who is nonetheless meticulously tending upstarts. After all, Nature sometimes laughs at the calendar, and wise farmers take their lead from Her. If we can’t all be sowing, why not make time for weeding, for tending the soil? During this season of honoring darkness, perhaps each of us could look into the darkness in our own hearts, identify any weeds rooted there that might be ripe for removal, and set about the difficult but satisfying work of weeding? Perhaps we can participate in cultivating our healthy crops by tenderly yet decisively uprooting the seeds and shoots of malice, violence, judgment, pettiness, and fear so that these don’t proliferate in our gardens?

Just maybe, when the rains have run their course and sunlight’s again heaped generously upon us, we will glean mended relationships, softened hearts, mutual understanding, forgiveness, tenderness, and the peace that comes from having engaged wholeheartedly in good, hard work. What abundance that would be . . .