Louisville Process Theology Network

Meditation while Gardening

“Like our friend David who meditates on Creation while
cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and
watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hole in the fencepost into the
cucumber patch. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in
the domain of the little miracle. As a hobby, this one could be considered
bird-watching with benefits.

Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of
being out there in the mud and fresh green growth. Why? An astute therapist
might diagnose us as codependent and sign us up for Tomato-Anon meetings. We
love our gardens so much it hurts.

For their sake we’ll bend over till our backs ache,
yanking out fistfuls of quackgrass by the roots as if we are tearing out the
hair of the world. We lead our favorite hoe like a dance partner down one long
row and up the next, in a dance marathon that leaves us exhausted. We scrutinize
yellow beetles with black polka dots that have suddenly appeared like chickenpox
on the bean leaves.

We spend hours bent to our crops as if enslaved, only
now and then straightening our backs and wiping a hand across our sweaty brow,
leaving it striped with mud like some child’s idea of war paint. What is it
about gardening that is so addicting?

That longing is probably mixed up in our DNA.
Agriculture is the oldest, most continuous livelihood in which humans have
engaged. It’s the line of work through which we promoted ourselves from just
another primate. It is the basis for successful dispersal from our original home
in Africa to every cold, dry, high, or clammy region of the globe.

Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough
prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories,
and build our cities …

All the important crops we now eat were already
domesticated around five thousand years ago. Early humans independently followed
the same impulse wherever they found themselves, creating small agricultural
economies based on domestication of whatever was at hand:  rice, beans, barley,
and corn on various continents, along with Sheep in Iraq (around 9,000 BC), pigs
in Thailand (8,000 BC), horses in the Ukraine (5,000 BC) and ducks in the
Americas (pre-Inca.)….

Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have
some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret
longing for some connection to life where a rooster crows in the yard.”

Page 177 from “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara
Kingsolver