Grow Along Week 5
How many plants can I fit on my small patio? And a word from Mary Oliver
Greetings!
This week I did a second round of planting seeds. I sat down in my bedroom, with my carpet protected by a shower curtain, and watched Gardener’s World1 while planting another *twenty* varieties of flowers and veg. Cue me googling more about square foot gardening!
For me personally, my goal this year is to have fun, create a jungle on my patio, and learn about gardening in a different zone from the one I learned in last year. While I’d love to grow enough tomatoes to live on for the year, the reality is I can’t. So I’m living within the constraints I have (isn’t that a theological lesson, oof) and aiming to create a space I can enjoy.
What are your goals for growing this season, and how are you coming along?
This week I want to share with you one of my favorite bits of writing by the poet Mary Oliver. Most of her work came from reflections on the natural world, and it’s nearly impossible to miss the reverence she has for creation and creatures. One of her most famous poems concludes with a line you have probably heard,
What is it you plan to do with your one, wild, and precious life?
Isolated from the poem, many people use this line to inspire them to LIVE LARGE, go on adventures, dive head first! But really, she says this after paying very close attention to a small grasshopper on a summer day and idling through the fields. For Mary, our one, wild, and precious life would be lacking if not attentive to nature, the patterns of creatures, and our own creatureliness.
This reflection is from Mary Oliver’s essay collection Upstream, published by Penguin Press in 2016. She writes:
Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heart coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don't keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the wind flower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones - inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones - rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
I feel as though Mary has said more than enough here for us to ponder, and for me to make further meaning of it would only be a disservice to her. So instead I offer you these prompts for reflection. Read the selection again with these in mind, and if you feel so inclined, I’d love to hear some of your answers in the comments.
What phrase or sentence jumps out to you? Think on it a while. Write it down somewhere you can see and revisit it. Wonder about it.
What feeling do these words and ideas evoke within you?
Does Mary’s work compel you toward any sort of action or inaction?
What might you do differently this week, keeping in mind attention is the beginning of devotion?
Every time I read this something new speaks to me, so I will leave my answers in the comments too. I would be so happy to chat with you there.
Next week I’m going to show you how to make a lovely resurrection garden. You can make it small or large, indoors or out, whatever suits your space. We’re not there yet, but it’s coming. Can you feel it? As they say in Narnia… Aslan is on the move.
May we all endeavor to keep our attention on eternity,
Janette
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Hosted by the ever lovely Monty Don. I grew to love Monty and the whole Gardener’s World crew whilst living in the UK. You can watch on BBC from the UK or on Britbox in the US. Every week throughout the growing season, Monty shows you what he’s working on while teaching you the craft, and they highlight other gardens around the UK and the world, as sent in by viewers. One hundred thousand percent recommend. Total comfort watch!