Eros in the Dirt

“This week the seed catalogs began to arrive.  Page after page of flowering bulbs, banks of midseason blossoms, lilies, hosts, and roses tempt me to transform my humble pachysandra beds into a small, city Eden.

I begin dreaming of a garden.  I want to grow rosemary and basil, pick mint that I can use for tea.  I want a beautiful, functional, meditative retreat.  I want color, fragrance, and the revitalizing qualities of manual work to balance my writing life”

I wrote these words two decades ago, as I was working to live a more balanced life for myself, a journey I chronicle in A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness.

And it was work.  I was an ambivalent student, a backslider.  For many years, the notion of “women’s work” had threatened my understanding of “success.”  But I had uncovered a deep hunger within — a spiritual, existential, and aesthetic hunger — for a life of MORE.   More than the relentless demands of my career.  More than endless conversations about current events, real estate prices, the hottest books and the newest restaurants.

During this time, my wise and wonderful doctor (herself a highly accomplished medical professional and mother of four), said this to me:

“Too much is not enough.”

I pondered those words many times as I learned to quiet the voices within that kept up a steady mantra of, “never enough, never enough,” like the busy elves and ants in the fairy tales.

Gardening — all those seed packets and little tufts of green parsley, the tomatoes that soon tumbled over my pots — taught me not only about the life of plants.  It taught me about the life of my soul:

“On my little patch of earth, no more than a quarter acre of shady, substandard lawn, I am free to do what I do for my own satisfaction….My garden will never be as glorious as L’s say, or K’s.  For one thing, I haven’t the room.  But the point of my garden will be different as well.  It will serve as a delicate reminder that creativity is never purely cerebral.  It is erotic.  It demands what the medievals called ‘heart’ – the life force that dwells in the ‘nowness’ of beauty and in the ‘hereness’ of passionate participation.”

 

May you find your ‘heart’ in work that you love, work for its own sake.  For this, we are told, pleases the Creator in ways we can’t explain, and don’t need to.