Learning in the Garden

On April 6, 1994 at approximately 7 o’clock in the morning I stepped out of the hospital into the sunlight.  Everything was abloom. Sleepy crocuses freshly emerged from their winter slumber peeked out from their beds, crabapple trees covered with pale pink flowers looked anything but crabby.  I was six months pregnant with my second child.  New life was inside my body, and all around me.  With one significant exception.  My mother had died two hours earlier.  I lived the intertwining of life and death in that instant. 

With the money I inherited, I planted a garden.  Not a utilitarian garden of which my mother would be proud, but a beautiful flower garden at which she would turn up her nose.  I learned so much from that garden!

The delphiniums taught me one of the most important lessons of all.  About two months into the whole garden adventure they were a bedraggled bunch with sparse blossoms struggling into the sunlight through thick clusters of dead leaves.  They cried out for euthanasia, and I almost granted their wish.  Instead I pruned, and when I was done I was convinced there wasn’t enough plant left to survive.  But within days they sprouted new leaves and buds and were nearly unrecognizable.  And here’s what I learned:  in order to thrive you have to be willing to cut out the parts that, while they’re part of your identity, are dead and no longer serve you.

In the habit of learning from plants, years later I learned an amazing lesson about reliance from a very unfortunate tree.  It had been cut down and mostly uprooted.  So imagine, if you will, a stump of a tree about 18 inches tall and 24 inches wide lying on its side with most of its roots exposed.  Now imagine that tree is fighting the good fight and grows branches which every year it covers with deep green leaves.  I used to run past that tree four times a week on my morning runs, and I couldn’t help but think that tree was defying death by its quiet insistence on growing anyway.  When I’m feeling torn town and uprooted—like say, recently, when I moved away from a community I loved and had yet to make a new community here—I feel like giving up.  Then I remember that brave tree, and I just have to keep going.

Today at Andover Newton, we celebrated Community Day.  This year’s theme was about planting seeds for a more religiously plural world.  Andover Newton is committed to becoming part of an interreligious university, where future clergy of differing faiths can strengthen their own religious identities while engaging in interfaith dialogues that will help people of faith work for peace.  Meadville Lombard Theological School, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, will be joined with us in this venture beginning June, 2011.  We are hoping that Hebrew College, already our partners in the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE) and joint course offerings, will join in this interreligious university as well.  It is such an exciting idea, such a transformative time and place to be a seminarian!

We planted bulbs to remind us of our commitment and our hopes every year.  I planted hundreds of crocuses, still my favorites because they were the first flowers to bloom after my mother died and I needed to be reminded that life goes on.  Some students had never planted bulbs and were nervous they’d do it wrong.  It occurred to me that the bulbs may blossom…or they may get eaten by squirrels, or they may decompose in the soil and give nourishment to surrounding plants.  But one way or another they will serve life.  The take home lesson: when you’re planting seeds you can't control the outcome, but really can’t do anything wrong either—so just plant, plant, plant and wait with joy for wondrous life to emerge!