It’s very hot in Texas – like so many places in the world right now – and my garden is moving into stillness.
A few weeks ago I harvested our first potato plants – in fact, our first potato plants ever. We thought they were dead due to the fierce heat. But I dug under the earth and found the most gorgeous golden baby potatoes. (You can read two poems I wrote about potato harvesting here.)
We had enough for two meals and to share with neighbors, and we saved a few for seed potatoes for the next crop. We harvested tomatoes, eggplant, yellow squash and a few giant zucchini.
But this week the zucchini died. Then the pumpkin. Then the tomatoes.
There is not much left – pepper plants, herbs, sweet potatoes and turmeric. The garden has come to rest.
Whenever I feel despairing or hopeless, I go to the earth. When I feel lost, I go to the earth. When I need to be oriented, I go to the earth. There I find wisdom.
The earth reminds us that life is always unfolding, that cycles ebb and flow, and that we can’t always see what’s happening below the surface. Watching a garden grow reminds us that the same life force that makes a potato grow also lives within us.
We may not always see the life and growth that is moving through us. But it’s there, in the dirt, in the soil, cradled by compost, reaching towards the light.
And the earth reminds us that there are seasons of rest just as there are seasons of growth. It’s not always harvest time.
Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for ourselves, like my garden, is to stop and rest and become fallow.
When we feel outside of the circle of our wholeness, we can feel so much push and inner drive to become more whole. We see the tattered places in our lives and we feel an urgency to fill the holes.
This is when we might drive ourselves hard in the name of healing, with food or otherwise.
But often what we need is not more momentum or movement, more pushing or learning, more inner work or self study, but to dissolve and disintegrate – to rest.
My friend Therese asks, “What are your relationships to dissolving? Are you aware of its creative power? What’s falling apart in your life right now? And I hope something is. It’s not easy, but it means you’re coming alive, again and again and again.”
What in your life is trying to come to stillness? To dissolve? To rest?
We don’t have to push the river of our healing. But we may be asked to rest at times, to slow down, to dissolve, and to be born anew. We will go through every season in the path of healing. May we be as open to the seasons of dissolving and rest as we are to the seasons of activity and growth.
As my garden rests in the heat, so may we.