I had to admit something to myself recently. For the last 2 months, I’ve been studiously avoiding starting our garden here in Maryland. Quite literally, I have not been putting down roots. And I feel a real conflict inside of me about it.
When we first moved into our new home, one of the first things I did was build 10 garden beds. By mid February I’ve had them filled up with leaves, mulch and goat poop to compost. Now it’s May, the frosts are gone, the nights are warm, it’s time to turn the compost into dirt, and put baby plants in the ground. But I am not doing it. The garden beds stand untouched. The soil, unfinished. The seeds unplanted. It’s gardening limbo and I hate it.
We’ve been busy otherwise. Got a flock of chickens. Got a milk goat and had some goat drama. But when I think of finally creating some soil and getting seedlings in the store, or buying some berry bushes and fruit trees to plant, I can’t do it.
Why?
Because I can’t bring myself to make a garden that I might not keep.
Our home in Maryland is a rental. We don’t own this land, and won’t keep anything we build or improve if we have to move again. We have a year lease, and the plan was to live in the burbs, get actively connected to the community, explore the local schools, find a shul, make friends and get invited out for Shabbos, and then to either put a bid on the house we are in, or look for something else. (And buying a house here will put us in a good 30 years of debt, so it’s a very serious decision.)
But now… with the Corona lockdown all those plans are out the window. There is no communal life. No shul. No jewish school. No Shabbos invites. No friend making for us or our kids. We are more isolated here than we ever were in California. And this is a situation that won’t change anytime soon, even with some restrictions lifted. Even if minimal religious functions restart in 2/4/6/? months it will be a much longer time until people start inviting strangers to dinner. So when will we get back to meeting people and choosing a shul? When will we know that we are in the right community and should buy a house here? In 6 months? In a year? In two years? When will we know if we should buy the land we are on? When can I start investing in a garden that I know I can keep?
The goats and chickens we can move. And they give an immediate benefit. The goat is giving milk, the chickens are laying eggs. But creating fertile earth… that’s an investment that pays off through the years. I will have to spend hundreds of dollars on soil amendments, mulch and sand. And then weeks and weeks of work mixing every foot of new soil by hand, keeping it organic, keep expanding the earthworm population, keep weeding. And worst of all, the more we clean up, the more we plant, the more we build, the more we will make this property attractive and more expensive for ourselves to buy down the road.
Investing a mass amount of time, effort, creativity and money into a garden that we can’t move, and may not keep feels unbearable. I want to profit from the fruit of my labors. Heck I want to eat the fruit of my labors. Good earth is an investment that takes years to recoup. The gardening work I do now is an investment that will take 10 years to really pay out. But we don’t know if we will be on this land to collect it. So I am not making earth. I am not planting. Because I can’t bear the thought of building a garden that I won’t keep.
But gardening has its own timeline. You plant in the Spring so that the seedlings can get big and strong enough to withstand and profit from the Summer sun. The Sun itself is different through the seasons, with a different quality of ultraviolet light that encourages growth in the Spring and fruiting in the Summer. If we want to harvest anything in the Fall, before the frosts come, we need to plant now. The planting timeline doesn’t care about Corona, or kiddushes or Shabbos guests. It’s planting time. Root up or shut up.
Yes, I could just not plant anything for a year like a normal person. We can just live in our rental. Go for walks in the burbs. Keep buying our fruits and veggies in the store. I won’t spend my time puttering in the dirt. No new beds. No new soil. Nothing will grow. Nothing to harvest. Nothing to worry about.
But a year without gardening? Without growth and green? Without dirt under my fingernails? With my kids finally learning that fruit grow in Amazon delivery bags? Honestly that also seemed unbearable. I truly love gardening. I love the work and effort involved. The challenge of figuring out what will grow, when and how. Of seeing my work grow and expand. Of eating what we grow. Tasting our own ripened veggies and fruit. In some way, I don’t know how not to farm through the year anymore. Those last 6 years on our California ranch, they changed me. And I feel it. I need to plant.
So what now? I am stuck between two unbearables. I want to plant. I want to mix the earth, spend the money on sand and mulch, and create a thriving garden. But I don’t want to feel bad when I do it. Or feel the pain of walking away in a year and leaving all that effort behind. I was stuck. And I needed a way out. And I found it, surprisingly, in my college memories.
We had a zen monk as part of our faculty in my small upstate new york college. I don’t know why he was there, or if he was a good monk or not. I’ve never once talked to him, but I would always notice him walking by, in his robes and sandals, always smiling about something. He taught classes on Buddhism and eastern religions, and was very popular with the white suburban kids who were common in my college.
His biggest class involved the making of a giant mandala in the Library atrium once a year. It was possibly the most popular class in our school, with a large waiting list and a lottery, and a reverent fan base. I never understood the appeal, but the mandala they created was hard to miss. It was huge, a circle 30 feet across, filled with drawn flowers, plants, lines, borders and columns – all fleshed out with an amazing amount of detail. It was all made with colored sand, that was poured into shapes and designs by means of tiny metal funnels that you had to tap to deliver a small trickle of sand to “paint” with. I worked in the library, so I would pass it daily, noticing how it was growing in complexity and detail through the months.
For half a year the monk and his students would create the mandala together. Carefully squatting inside the unpainted part of the circle, filling in every quadrant with colored sand designs piece by piece. I would see them on their knees bending down, the monk and 10 people watching the trickle of sand form the needed designs. Then at the end of the class, in a ceremony, they would take large brooms and sweep all the colored sand up, put it into bags, and take it all away.
Just like that, an intricate art piece of immense complexity and effort would be gone without a trace from the library floor. I saw the mandalas grow and disappear for 4 years, but I never once went to the sweeping away ceremonies. It was there one day, and then it was gone. It bothered me though, all of that wasted work, effort and material. It seemed ridiculous. A “spiritual ” distraction for the rich white kids to brag about at their frat parties. I didn’t want any part of that. And I didn’t think again about mandalas for 15 years, until this month.
While I was pondering what to do about my limbo garden, the memory of the monk’s mandala floated back into my mind. Painstaking, complex, beautiful work that was from the onset meant to be impermanent. Creation without attachment. Art without possession. Investment for the sake of investment. I found it foolish and pretention when I was in college, but now, after meditating and listening to E.Tolle, I had to admit there was something to it. And maybe those frat kids were learning something that I wasn’t.
So I put this as a challenge to myself. Can I garden and do something that I love for its own sake? Can I plant without ownership? Can I invest without attachment? Can I build, mix earth, and weed, without the expectation of permanency or long term reward? Can this garden be my giant mandala of dirt?
When I first posed this question to myself – I felt the power of that gesture – but I could not imagine doing it myself. The idea of not owning, and possibly walking away from a year’s worth of effort and creativity seemed impossible. Better to do nothing, than to feel the pain of losing it. If the earth is not mine, then let it lay fallow.
But then I remembered that we inherited our first garden from someone else as well. It was started by the old man who we bought our California ranch from. Eventually I expanded on his work, and redid everything, but it was the garden beds he built, and trees he planted that we started from. It was his work and investment that encouraged me to try putting seeds in the ground and experiencing the joy of their growth for the first time. The truth is that we ourselves were not gardeners from scratch, we learned and started with the benefit of someone else’s investment.
Perhaps this is a greater truth about gardening. You do it because you love it. You do it because you must. Someone’s effort brings you into gardening, and then your own effort brings in someone else. The earth, the trees, the beds, that cleared space ready for seeds… you pay it forward. Maybe that’s what it means to be part of the community of gardeners. It’s our own fragrant edible zen. And it may not always be yours to keep forever. But it’s always beautiful. And it’s always worth it.
………….
Well… I am going to stop crying. About gardening. And go mix some earth for planting. Thanks monk. This mandala is for you.
