the rose garden

Garden of miracles,
what kind of garden are you?

It’s been awhile since I posted any of my daily Rumi. That dude sure loved garden metaphors. His work makes me want to plant more roses. Or maybe gardenias (which I think don’t survive Virginian winters). Roses aren’t my fragrant flower of choice.

One of my favorite things at home is sitting in or looking out over the back yard, which is a bit of a garden and a bit of scraggly urban landscape. It’s easier to follow a meditation discipline with the support of the green things and the city. All that oxygen to breathe in! And that nourishing carbon dioxide to share with plants! Of course it’s easy to feel interconnected with things when you so clearly are – sharing air and nutrients and everything.

Rumi’s gardens are more spiritual metaphors than physical places. More than the metaphor, though, I love the idea of the physical place containing miracles. It does.

Just this morning,
contemplation
led me into
the rose garden that is
neither
outside this world
nor within it.
- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
(both of these passages were translated by Andrew Harvey in A Year of Rumi)

i made dirt.

This weekend I tried to make a semi-secluded corner in the yard by putting up trellissy stuff and planting mandevilla (it’s the first step of many, I imagine) and a couple of zinnias. The soil back in that corner looked like it had been in some sort of war zone, so the approach that usually works in this yard – dig a hole, put something in it, wait for that something to grow into a monstrosity – seemed a bad idea. [As a side note: one of the added features of a house that stays uncared for over a few years is that the dirt gets amazing, full of dead stuff and nutrients. I think this is why everything grows huge and ungainly here. It's like growth hormone for plants.]

I have, however, been quietly and lazily composting yard and ungross kitchen waste since this winter. I dug into my compost pile, and? I? HAVE MADE DIRT. The bottom of the pile is dark, rich, you-can’t-buy-this soil, complete with helpful creatures.

That is awesome. I have made some art that really moved me. I have done work that felt like it mattered. And now? I have made dirt, the most fundamental thing you can make outside yourself.

Yay.

we must destroy in order to rebuild

The past few days I’ve drifted away from my path here. I had a cheeseburger for dinner. I was in an accident over the weekend, and I haven’t eaten more than half of anything in front of me since Saturday night. Until the cheeseburger.

The whole accident thing left me with sensory overwhelm. Getting into the garden soothes that. So. I planted lavender, nasu, more tomatoes, squash, cucumber, rhubarb, and a ton of climbing flower seeds. And hung a bird feeder (which is doing wonders at keeping the birds from nomming my tasty plantlets).

I am sadly going to have to replace my car – though at least I contemplated life without one, it’s actually impossible to get to work from my house via public transit. Who builds an office complex completely off the transit grid? We do, apparently.

It’s a consolation, then, that if all these things grow I could skip buying any produce but berries this summer. It’s been so long since I ate a cherry tomato hot off a plant in my own yard.

I have some other livelihood stuff in mind to talk about, but first I need to hang with this whole post-accident feeling.