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It’s that time of the year again: A time for me to get up off my recliner, stretch my creaking bones, and to resist the urge to sit back down again.
There are flowers to be planted. There first is crusty soil to cultivate. There are garden gloves to soil and then put out to pasture.
All this is done not just to heave and to ho or to grow and to mow or to weed and to sow but to reap the invigorating reward that comes from spending time in the therapeutic act of beautifying the landscape.
Gardening, especially, can be a form of grounding in the meditational sense. Some have even gone so far as to equate it with a silent prayer. The past-time seems to have a calming effect on most who take up the trowel, while others would rather be doing anything else than bending down and getting one’s clothes dirty, when they’d rather be watching football or attending drag races.
In ancient times, philosophers would often gather their pupils around some quiet and secluded natural setting in which to teach as it was thought the sunlight and fresh air aided in stimulating one’s thinking abilities.
I recently took to re-watching a film I like: “Being There,” starring Peter Sellers. The actor plays a simple-minded gardener who is mistaken by a high-ranking politician for being a sapient. The protagonist is a man of few words but loves his flower pots and botanical buddies. In the movie’s closing shot, he is seen walking on water and the suggestion is made that this is a “super natural” man for his being so vernal and unworldly. This admirable man-child is certainly no “lord of nature.”
When I am out tending to a garden (I sometimes help out friends with theirs) I often think of whether plants are sensorial creatures on par with the animal world, as some think of them to be. Plant life is definitely precious as the process of photosynthesis clearly demonstrates. One book I read made the point that plants could easily survive without humans but that the opposite is not true. Gardening is just one way of showing the respect if not the reverence that is due these beings.
Springtime. There is nothing quite like it. A time for rock-hounds to come out from underneath their own rocks and when groundhogs have quit playing games with our weather reporters.
Here when nature-deprivation gives way to contact and the dryads and sprites of yore caress the morning dew and afternoon air with their enchanting anima.
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