Out in the Garden

Out in the Garden is a delightful book by Dean Riddle that first convinced me that I, too, could be a gardener. And that it was a task worth taking on.

I just came in from my tiny, unimpressive, needs-tons-of-work suburban Virginia garden. (It's funny how, in America, we say "yard" where the Brits would say "garden." Ground Force, in addition to providing endless hours of porn in the form of Tommy, (about whom I feel the way the comic strip Cathy's mother felt about Prince Charles on his wedding to Di: "He never even got to meet you!") Tommy, if you ever tire of Mrs. Walsh, those children, the Cockney part of London, ok, my father's family were Cockneys while the Walshes were still living in Wales, but, you know what I mean . . . ) also helped to convince me that gardening wasn't too serious an endeavor for me to mount. Pun intended)). I pulled weeds from the herb bed, esp. the section devoted to dill. By mistake, I pulled up a tender dill seedling along w/ the weeds and grass. I ate it. it tasted fresh and green and the way that I imagine Spring in Sweden (the land of my peeps) must taste -- forget the Wild Strawberries, Ingmar. (Do you do this too? Do you free-associate all the way through your garden? If you do, I'd love to hear about it, either in comments here or via email!)

I stuck my nose deep into the tiny, pink old fashioned roses that the people who were here before me planted outside the screen porch. It's enough to say that I'm not a huge rose fan, (rose bushes look gorgeous for about three weeks out of the year and, for the other 49 weeks, not so much). But the smell of a rose does amazing things to a human. At first, my thought, nose buried deep in the rose, ass pointed high in the air, was that smelling a rose takes us to a different place. But then, I thought, "No, not really. It takes us to Earth." We live too little of our lives here on Earth and too much of our lives on tv, on the internet, in our heads. Smelling a rose brings us back to Earth.

T. Thorn Coyle is big on reminding us of this: we are EMBODIED consciousness, at least for this time around, this life, this attempt to become who we really are. We are spiritual to the extent that we are able to connect our bodies, our minds, and that ineffable something else that the xians call soul. I remember this best in the garden, fingers dirty, nose in a plant's sex organ, dill leaves on my tongue, sun reaching past me to have the most amazing sexual congress with the green leaves that make food from the sun.

Thriving. For me, it happens out in the garden. Where does it happen for you? How will you make it happen, how will you keep on making it happen under the Bush (was any man ever more incongrously named?) coup? Does it happen for you at all?

I'm going to go plant moonflower seeds (I bought some more, since the last packet had so few) around the foot of my deciduous magnolia and see if they'll balance the leaves of GWPDA's black iris for the rest of the summer. And attract the hummingbirds. Then I'm going to sit under the Green Man wind chimes that my gorgeous friend Kathy gave me and see what the wind can say to me today.