Gardening

            I’m not much of a gardener. If you don’t believe me, ask Kim. Our Bark House is pretty much surrounded by gardens that Kim has designed, planted, and maintains. I help when and how I can, but most of the time Kim says, “That’s OK – I’ll take care of it.”

 

            I am slowly learning to tell the difference between a flower and a weed: If it looks healthy, it’s probably a weed, and if I’m standing on it, it’s probably a flower. And no, I don’t garden this way on purpose just to get out of the work. Kim says that my problem is that I just don’t want to learn to garden. She’s probably right: I’d like to know without having to learn.

 

            Nevertheless, I enjoy gardening. It gets me outdoors and away from all the crap that is going on in the world. My “gardening” usually involves a wheelbarrow. (Much like my “cooking” involves reaching things on high shelves, or opening a lid that Kim can’t.) We just spread a half-truckload of pine bark that we hauled, load by load, all around our property. It’s part of our non-lawn cottage look. I also haul rocks, as in our recent project building a river bed for the rainwater that our downspout delivers from our garage gutters.

 

            But there is more to gardening, as Voltaire clarified for us in his 1759 book, Candide. The book describes a world of stupidity, wars, greed, cruelty and injustice, all written as a comical refutation of the philosopher Pangloss’s hollow claim, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” Candide’s conclusion, after witnessing and surviving these horrors: “We must cultivate our garden.”

 

            What does this concluding message mean? When I taught Candide, my students were generally confused by this ending, which seemed small in comparison with the horrors that Candide witnessed and experienced. But no. Maybe part of the solution – and I’m thinking of our own world’s horrors – is to look after your own garden. This is not necessarily a garden. It can be whatever small part of your world that you can tend to and improve.

 

            In Kim’s case, it actually is a garden. She has created a beautiful half-acre of flowers and greens, while preserving another half-acre of woods. But think about other ways we can cultivate our gardens by tending to an area of our lives that we can grace with beauty, or kindness, or perhaps a small insight. Kim also “cultivates her garden” in the way she has designed our world within the Bark House and the way she presents a meal on a plate. Maybe you can play some music, tell a good story, or kindly give directions to someone who is lost, or share a bit of food you created. I like to think that my weekly blog posting is my way of cultivating my garden – creating, in a small way, a contribution in the face of all the cruelty and madness in the world. (Note how I turned gardening into a metaphor so I can be included.)

 

            I know, I know: It’s not enough. We still need to sign petitions, send some money to support justice and sanity, maybe take to the streets. Certainly: vote for the right people. We need to fight the cruelty and madness, frustrating as that fight might be. A college friend sent a good sum of money to our local land conservancy in order to plant a three-acre butterfly meadow – one that Kim and I explored last week. All the way from California he cultivated our garden here in Northern Michigan. Cultivating our gardens, however we find a way to do it, can be a huge step toward creating a kind and beautiful world, countering the horrors with beauty and kindness. Make, at least, a small difference . . .. Think of the billions of deeds that individuals do, and can do, to cultivate our earthly garden. (I just deleted a poor paragraph – my most recent act of gardening.)