"Be a gardener.
Dig and ditch.
Toil and sweat and turn the earth upside down
and seek the deepness
and water the plants in time.
Continue this labor and make sweet floods to run
and noble and abundant fruits to spring.
Take this food and drink
and carry it to God as your true worship."
— Julian of Norwich (14th c. Mystic)
"Seek the deepness!" Profound changes are coming for this swath of the globe as sunlight edges its way back into the crevices of our days. Its gentle ambiance and late-winter mottled glow is slowly brightening, lengthening, and continuing its journey toward full saturation.
How about you? What light is slowly finding its way into your awareness?
While longing for springtime, maybe we can begin planting the soul-seeds that will be tended by the light of our attention, and watered by our precious tears of gratitude, joy, sorrow or longing.
What we give our attention to grows. What we neglect or ignore withers.
What mysterious seedlings are opening in the deep furrows of our own soul, where we hide our fears, anxieties, shame, and feelings of inadequacy or suffering? What potent seed pods are holding our untapped holy desires, the ones that connect us to our heart's longing, that free us and fill us with energy and wonder?
Nature is doing its deep work right now, before the soil is turned and the seedlings are sown. Why not us? What if we begin thinking of our gardens this year - both our soul-gardens and our backyard or community gardens - as a way of performing acts of restorative kindness toward ourselves and toward our beautiful blue planet? Healing isn't impossible. It's only a lack of imagination and attention that keeps us from "watering the plants in time."
Mary Reynolds (https://marymary.ie/) is an internationally renowned and self-designated "reformed" award-winning landscape designer who promotes gardening as "Acts of Restorative Kindness" to Earth. ARK, as her movement is called, reframes the concept of gardening as evincing the mutuality of nature's and our own "re-wilding" impetus. We thrive when nature thrives. We come alive, thrive, and die back to Earth in natural cycles. We were never meant to think of ourselves as separate from nature, or above nature. We are truly one, one web of intricately and intimately connected life.
So this spring, as we "Dig and ditch, toil and sweat and turn the Earth upside down," let's also "seek the deepness." How can we go deeper in our soul's maturation process? What colorful, potent, aromatic, vibrant, nourishing seedlings we will cultivate in the depths of our own soul? "Seek the deepness."
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