Growing Into a Higher Truth

Growth is a funny thing, I thought this morning very early as I stepped out to feel the dew on my feet and look at my garden for what seem the first time in weeks.

For most of a very hot summer, the kale and Swiss chard, basil, nasturtiums and cherry tomatoes had stretched with a kind of timid courtesy, not showing a lot of leg.   At the start of August I was able to harvest two greeny-orange nickel-sized tomatoes from the vine, and pinch a handful of those dazzling little suns, the nasturtiums, to put on a salad.  I didn’t dare take more than a leaf or two of the leafy things, for fear they’d succumb on the spot.

I went away, I came back, I plunged into my work.

The garden was left to its own devices for a good month, maybe more.

Until this morning, when I went outdoors to ground myself in goodness before watching the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford in the Supreme Court hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Like so many, my heart was anxious.  The scars and wounds of many women and some men seemed on the line, one story emblematic of all.

What I discovered in the garden staggered me.  The tomato vines nearly pulled me under.  They are at least 7 feet tall and laden with clusters of sweet, juicy fruit.  The kale and the chard reach almost to my knees.  It is beautiful.  It is abundant.  I almost keeled over looking at what had transpired during my time of benign neglect.

I remembered suddenly (perhaps because of the time of year) another moment when growth took me utterly by surprise – and left me every bit as shaken, though not as happily.  It was the morning I drove my son to his college orientation.  Everything was going fine until we hit the spot on the highway from which we could see the city where he was going to live for four years, the spire of the campus chapel beckoning, inexorably, on the horizon.

Though I’d witnessed all the morphings of adolescence, I was totally unprepared for the reality of that moment, frozen in my memory forever.   Growth had snuck up on me, big time.

Growth is powerful and disruptive and untimely and non-linear.  It can’t be stopped or silenced or tucked out of sight.  It changes the equation in a garden, family, a relationship, even when we aren’t expecting it.  It changes our perspective on ourselves, when we wake up one day and find that the life we’ve been living has gotten too small, or is not sufficiently true – even when that life is busy and all-consuming.

A young dancer recently described her move from her hometown to a big city this way:

“Back there, my skin felt too tight.  Here, it feels too loose.  I haven’t found my shape yet.”

One of the gifts that I have received during these past weeks of public anguish, accusations, and drama has not been without its private pain:  the insight that the seeds of truth will grow and eventually bear fruit, no matter how harsh the conditions, or how hard the journey to light.

Until it is ready to reveal itself, growth is invisible, rife with tension, and, often, loss.  We want our children to grow up, but not too quickly, or too much, or too far away.  We want to domesticate growth, to control its timing, oversee its morphology.  We don’t want to see our friends or family members as other than we’ve always seen them.   Acknowledging change can be harder than pretending everything is the same, when we know that it isn’t, and won’t ever be again.

Perhaps this is why we are given the gift of gardens, so that we can see the loveliness of growth as a paradigm for all the other forms of growth that are hard, all of the growth that the great Jungian thinker Helen Luke has called, “the agony of consciousness.”

We will never get used to the pain of being stretched into new consciousness, but we need to remember that it is necessary. These days, I am hearing stories of painful growth all around me.  They are personal stories.   But I wonder if their intensity isn’t a harbinger of the necessary correctives to our intensely and painfully upended public life?

As the harvest nears (and the chipmunks beat me to my own tomatoes), my prayer is that we greet change less with anger or fear than with a kind of willing wonder that enables us to open our hearts and hands to the mysterious ways of Spirit, or the Universe, or whatever your language, and to trust the support and nourishment we will receive from the truths that want to break our timid or stunted forms to make us more whole.

Namaste.