Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Healing the Garden & Ourselves

As I ready the landscape for spring, I'm reminded of Linda Hogan's words, which we've just read in my English classes. Her book is Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, and highly recommended. 

"The word rake means to gather or heap up, to smooth the broken ground. That's what this work is, all of it, the smoothing over of broken ground, the healing of the severed trust we humans hold with earth. We gather it back together again with great care, take the broken pieces and fragments and return them to the sky. It is work at the borderland between species, at the boundary between injury and healing."

And as I cut down old sunflower stems beneath migrating snow geese and sand hill cranes half a mile above:

"In this one plant, in one summer season, a drama of need and survival took place. Hungers were filled. Insects coupled. There was escape, exhaustion, and death. Lives touched down a moment and were gone.

I was an outsider. I only watched. I never learned the sunflower's golden language or the tongues of its citizens. I had a small understanding, nothing more than a shallow observation of the flower, insects, and birds. But they knew what to do, how to live. An old voice from somewhere, gene or cell, told the plant how to evade the pull of gravity and find its way upward, how to open. It was instinct, intuition, necessity. A certain knowing directed the seed-bearing birds on paths to ancestral homelands they had never seen. They believed it. They followed."

10 comments:

greggo said...

Some would call that faith.

Benjamin Vogt said...

Faith in action?

Donna@Gardens Eye View said...

I can see it is a definite read..I was going to not add any new garden books to my list and finish what I had but this one is a must..so much more...speaks my language and says much better what I tried to say in my latest post...thx for sharing this book!

Going Native said...

Thank you for a great post. I will add that book to my list.

Benjamin Vogt said...

Donna--you know I like to help yo find new books!
Mary--You better! :)

Kathy said...

Wow, I'll never look at a sunflower the same.

Corner Gardener Sue said...

Well said! Let the cycle begin anew!

Corner Gardener Sue said...

My wild senna plants look like they are deciding to come up. I was starting to worry.

Benjamin Vogt said...

Geeze Sue, it shouldn't even be up fora few more weeks! This weather stinks. I'm frantic. But senna is, I'd say in the tail end 50% that comes for me, as in, it's in the later half of plants.

Cheese, twine, and wine said...

beautiful. thanks for sharing.