Medicine from the Madness

When I am Afraid I Go to the Garden

When I am afraid I go to the garden. It is a place that wears the mask of control well, and good practice for handling the world outside.

The fact it exists at all is because of the tender work of hope and hands. Seeds chosen in the despair of winter, every packet a prayer for June. Hours spent turning soil in the wet spring, cursing frosts and covering the vulnerable from suffering. It is a sanctuary of compassion in all this cruelty.

If the remedy for anxiety is action or distraction; vegetable tending offers both. I have no power over the economy, or climate change, or national politics. Hell, I barely have control over my squash beetle problem…

But that’s just it, here in the garden I have taken steps towards solving it. Not only is this little piece of wilderness domesticated, so are the problems. I can’t control the myriad of obstacles a garden faces, but I can combat them. My efforts matter. And every year I learn more and get better.

I am needed to protect those pumpkins. Without me they would perish, and while saving a dozen jack-o-lanterns doesn’t do much for the world; it does a lot for me.

I am needed in the garden. I am useful. My efforts makes meaningful change to other living things, and not just any living things, but ingredients to meals so delicious I am getting light-headed writing this. To think of what this farm can offer my friends and community, literally the water and food that sustains life… I never felt that in an email marketing meeting.

My plants depend on me like a lamb depends on her mother, like the ewe depends on the shepherd. I depend on them, too. This is the work that makes it possible for me to live here.

I don’t leave this place to work a job that earns money for groceries. I stay here and grow them. Hours that used to be spent in conference calls are now used to can sauce and dry beans, fill baskets with potatoes and onions. Being able to eat from your garden isn’t just frugal. It’s freedom.

In the garden my hands keep busy. Whatever is cycling in my mind is replaced with blessed frustration and nettle stings. I have tasks that require attention, and sweat, and time. To weed for an hour is to avoid social media for an hour. To remind myself that the pet computer I pretend is a phone isn’t as real as the bindweed, can’t light up my nerves with sensation like black fly bites. Everything is in front of me, touchable, intentional.

In the garden I am never alone. I may be alone on a long walk, or at my desk writing, but loneliness is impossible in there. There are the lives of the plants I’m tending, but also the animals. The toad hopping past my bare feet and the golden orb weaver in the tomatoes. I can see the cottontail on the other side of the fence eyeing the chard shoots, and the garter snake hiding under the rhubarb’s massive leaves.

The bird shit on the mulch hay and pepper leaves makes me smile. I know it is from the baby phoebes who nest nearby, how they learn to hunt insects from the trellises, a reminder that my grocery store is their flight school. We all share this space, and every one of them has a story if you listen for it.

In the garden I am part of something. I am time traveling. One moment I am shifting uncomfortably in the swelter, sweat dripping down my brow and landing on the radish leaves. I blink and it’s the first snowstorm of winter, and I am reaching for a ruby-red jar of pasta sauce the spiders protected with their fortress of webs. Opening that jar while the world is gray and remembering I was there. Not for the linguini, but for the liturgy. This is church. This is the meaning of my life. Stay busy, stay useful, keep going.

In the garden I can hear myself. I don’t mean a quiet mind, I mean if I stay out there long enough I can hear my heartbeat, can feel it in my chest. On still evenings before a thunderstorm, when even the birds are quiet, I swear I can hear my blood circulate. It sounds like a shell lifted to my ear to hear the ocean as a little girl. And in that moment I can’t believe I chose to ignore this place where my own blood calms my nerves.

In the garden I feel less afraid of dying, because I reminded it doesn’t exist. Things wither, they droop, some shrivel and fall to the earth but that’s only another part of their story. Their energy can’t disappear and will add to the world. Even the grotesque has use and beauty here. My sungolds crave the violence of blood meal, my strawberries ripen among the horseshit I mucked the summer before.

Blood and shit turned into something beautiful. You think magic can’t happen in this broken world? We believe in silly things like death and decay because we think change is bad. Change is how we become forever, too.

The garden is medicine from the madness.
It doesn’t fix the world, but it does fix you.

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