Every time I work in the garden plot we share with friends, I am reminded that I am living in an aging body that I share with a couple of thankfully currently controlled cancer tumors on my spine.
I can’t get down on my knees anymore, nor can I do any heavy lifting of dirt or turning of soil. I work bent over, with a hand shovel, and stand up between pretty much every handful of weeds pulled or a seedling transplanted. I take as many minutes of breaks as I give in working minutes. Like in life, in the garden, some days you work really hard and think, nothing looks different. Other days, things explode into life, and all you do is enjoy a cool drink amongst the trees.
Oddly, this rarely depresses me but rather brings me a peaceful kind of joy. It feels like there are life lessons here in patience, acceptance and letting go of expectations. Our garden is just controlled enough to grow stuff, and just wild enough to be deeply alive. We’re not the kind of gardeners who pull every weed and trim every bush. It may sound trite, but the reality of the garden reminds me everything is a cycle of life and death, and as Bob Dylan famously sang, “if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” Today, I pulled a few weeds to make space for pea seedlings, cleared the overgrown path on one side of our little garden hut, and harvested berries — slightly sour boysenberries, lovely raspberries, and teeny tiny wild strawberries — a miniature burst of summer in your mouth. I also ate sweet fresh peas, drank a couple beers, and sat among the old growth fruit trees and chirping birds writing this column.
Every day I wake up and seek to stay busy being born — it helps to avoid the roller coaster of emotions and grief of the news reports that I try to limit intake of and at least save until after lunch, mixed with sources that report on the hopeful actions being taken by so many of us in so many ways in our communities. Each of us needs to decide what our role in the resistance is – what feeds us, what we can sustain. Joy is resistance, rest is resistance. Gardening and mutual aid are resistance. In a world that tries to convince us that we can never do enough and we should sleep when we’re dead, in a world where we are judged by our productivity more than our kindness, resistance looks like taking care of ourselves and each other. As Pope Francis said, looking in the eyes of a beggar and acknowledging their humanity without judgment is more important than how much, if anything, you are willing or able to give monetarily.
Compassion for and suspending judgment of ourselves and others isn’t easy. It’s hard – and we can handle it. Accept how much energy it takes. We’re humans, not efficient machines. Productivity and endless growth is a trap designed to exhaust us and steal our humanity so we don’t challenge the injustices in this world. As UU minister Lynn Ungar writes, “Being of service – having an impact on someone else’s life – has been shown in a wide variety of studies to make people happier – significantly happier than if they do something nice for themselves.”
In this community, we sustain each other in times of grief and celebrate each other in times of joy. We may often be far apart, yet we can connect in so many ways.
Now more than ever, this hurting world needs our values. How do we sustain ourselves when this roller coaster we’re on leaves us fatigued and spent?
Reach in – Zoom in to one of our monthly ALIOSC online worship services the fourth Wednesday of each month. (In June, we met for informal worship and simply supported each other by lighting a chalice and sharing both our grief and our inspirations.) Zoom in to Morning Coffee Drop-in, casual get-togethers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:30–10:30 am or later. (The Zoom Room is a no-host set up – so open your computer and see who joins you.) Find joy in gardening and sharing tips with others, share joy with others in person at our retreats – you can still register for Cologne, coming this September!
Reach out – share the new logo that symbolizes our values with love at the center, get yourself or a friend a “JETPIG” (a cute stuffed pig toy designed by the UUA RE folks to help kids remember our values with an acronym), practice mutual aid in your neighborhood (ask me for a list of ideas), encourage others by posting both necessary actions and successes on social media – find your little corner of the good fight, educate yourself and “make good trouble”. The latest round of resistance through protest was on July 17th, John Lewis Day – celebrating the civil rights activist who first coined the phrase, “make good trouble.”
Reach in again – help sustain us all by sustaining yourself, whatever that looks like for you – time alone, time with friends, exercise, good food and drink, sleep, zoning out with a novel or silly TV series, cooking, gardening – or maybe something totally different. You can only give when your own glass is not empty.
I am glad our garden has given me the sustenance to share these words with you. And I hope they give you some courage to stay busy being born, and to stay connected to our community. We UUs have much this hurting world needs. We make a difference by aspiring to live our values. Hope to hug many of you in Cologne!
Bonnie