Archive for the 'joy' Category

Saving the World

Sharon September 6th, 2009

One talks about saving the world, and of course, you know you can’t do it.  The world is vast, its problems massive, its fragile ecology so complex that it is hard to know where to start.  Or perhaps it isn’t quite as hard as we think. 

To understand this story you have to start with three young girls, cousins.  One of them was a teenager, nearly 16, with a boyfriend.  The other two were younger, 11 and 12, and when the teenager wanted to be alone with her boyfriend, walking in the park, their mothers would send the two younger girls, each an only child, with their cousin to play chaperone.  The younger girls were too young to fully understand why the older one wanted to be alone, so the older one and her boyfriend would give them money for ice cream, or bet that the younger girls couldn’t run around the park in a certain time, hoping for a few precious minutes apart. Imagine them, a slim teenager, newly in love, and two pesky younger cousins, wanting still to play.

There is a picture of the girls, a few years before our story, at a birthday party.  The two younger ones are excited, still children, the older one just barely a teenager.  They all smile for the camera, and are caught, in a single moment, alive, together.  All of them were beautiful young women, all bright eyed with dark hair – there was a family resemblance.  That picture would matter a lot in the years to come.

…And you have to start with three grown women – also cousins.  All of them mothers, all of them loving their children more than their own lives, quite literally,  each with one daughter, living in the city together, raising the girls as closer than most cousins, consulting with each other on the ordinary dilemmas of daily life. 

This, however, was Berlin in the late 1930s, and the ordinary dilemmas of daily life were becoming much more acute, for the women and their daughters were Jews.  Already Jews were being transported, and stories leaked back from the camps – probably rumor, of course – it would have to be rumor, because such terrible things could not be truth.

Then came the big decision – the kindertransport.  Good people organized a way to take Jewish children – only the children, even the babies had to go alone – out of Germany, to a faraway land, to stranger.  But where were they taking them?  To England, soon to be a war zone.  And when could they come back?  The stories of the camps could not really be true - to put your daughter on the train by herself, send her off to who knows where, a place that might be less safe…?  How could you know what to do?  But if you believed the terrible rumors, the bits of evidence that filtered back to the ghetto, even a tiny bit…  What to do?

In the end, two of the girls, two of the three cousins, the teenager, barely young enough for a place, and the now-14 year old, they got on the train.  The other cousin did not go.  I can only imagine what her mother thought -  that even in the ghetto, she’d be safer with her mother.  Who could ever blame any mother for thinking that?  Who chooses to imagine the circumstances in which parental love for their children is not enough.  Imagine the consultations, the discussions, the debates that the parents had, and how strong those three women were – two strong enough to let their daughters go, one strong enough to believe that she could protect her child as mothers are supposed to.

The older girl’s boyfriend was over 17 – there was no place for him on the train –  he waved goodbye, and the oldest girl closed her eyes and decided not to believe any of the stories.  The two girls on the train were set to work caring for the youngest ones, including babies and children so small that they did not understand what was happening.  Each girl carried all she had of her past in one suitcase and the pockets of her clothes.

Fast forward 70 years - earlier this week, 22 kindertransport survivors retraced the journey out of Prague that they took, to be met by the man who arranged the Czech children’s evacuation, now 100 years old.  Sir Nicholas Winton hid for decades his participation in saving  the lives of 669 Jewish children who otherwise would almost certainly have died.  All in all the kindertransport saved 7,500 Jewish children.

The “children” are now in their 70s and 80s, and their benefactor has seen a whole century.  I wish for him that he might live, as we say, “to one hundred and twenty.”  If there are blessings prayer can bestow, I wish for all of them for him and his family. Without him, and without the other people who worked hard to bring about the kindertransport, my husband would not be here, nor my children - for the young girl on the cusp of adolescence who made it out was his Grandmother, Inge.  I knew her in her in her 70s, and she and her cousin Margot, the teenager, would tell merrily the stories of Inge’s chaperoning her older cousin and her boyfriend, Markus, of how innocent and foolish Inge was, of what they did when they made it to Britain.

Many of the stories were sad and hard – Inge was taken in by a British family that used her as virtual slave and abused her physically.  Margot waited and waited for the boyfriend she loved – and learned he’d been taken to Auschwitz, and after that, knew nothing more for a long time, even though she continued to wait.  They learned Margot’s parents were transported, and that Inge’s father died in the ghetto.  And yet, they always laughed together.  Inge found love.  They found ways to be happy through all the hard years of the war, with each other.

And they always took out the picture – the only one they still had, of the other cousin, the one who did not make the risky journey to Britain, through war-torn lands.  The one they envied, at the time, because she stayed with her mother, in the arms of someone who loved her.

The war ended, and they learned that the stories were true, what they thought could not have happened, had.  The cousin, her mother and father, all of them were murdered in Auschwitz.  Markus, the beloved boyfriend survived the camps, wasted, tortured, but alive, and the day they got the letter saying he was alive was one of the happiest days of not just Margot’s life, but Inge’s as well.  By then Inge was married to Cyril, a young Jewish RAF soldier, and expecting their first baby.  The two cousins were living together, and they celebrated, even though they did not know what to expect, when Markus came home, traumatized.

And miracle of miracles, one of the mothers survived as well.  We still do not know the whole story – somehow, in their gratitude at survival, no one asked.  But we know that Inge’s mother,  Else, whose force of character was such that she got her daughter a precious space on the kindertransport, that she sent her daughter off to the unknown to give her a future, did something quite astounding.  After the death of her husband, long after no Jews were permitted to leave, in 1941 as many of the last Jews in Berlin were being transported, she escaped Germany, somehow, and crossed the border, making it, eventually, into Lisbon and then to America.   What she did to get there we may never know. 

Inge is gone now, and Cyril too – they left two children, three grandchildren.  Else is gone, and my son Elias Alexander is named for her, and her heroic second husband, Ali, who helped Jews escape Germany by conducting them over the Danish border, who escaped the Nazis and hid in the forest until he too could cross the border.  They lived to help make my husband the man he is.   Inge and Cyril lived to see four great-grandsons, to integrate into the daily life of three of them and to make frequent visits to the fourth, and Inge to know that the last one of their great-grandsons would carry names for them.  Markus and Margot married, had children and grandchildren, and Markus died only a few year ago too.  Margot lives in assisted living in New Jersey, and still holds the letter sent by Else to her and to Inge when she reached Lisbon.  All the children of the kindertransport are grown old, with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their own.

I cannot describe the great spark of joy I felt when I read that Sir Nicholas Winton was still alive.  Those who arranged Inge and Margot’s journey are mostly dead now, but at least one person remains to be grateful to for the lives that were saved.  In the vast swath of death that came for the Jews and for so many others, there was life, and reason for laughter, and memories worth having.  There was survival, but more, there was a future, a future embodied in my four small sons, who would not be here without the work of Winton and others like him.  And they would not be here without the courage of ordinary mothers, who sometimes choose rightly, and sometimes wrongly, sometimes can resist the forces of history and sometimes are swept along with them, but whose best they can is sometimes nearly enough.   They would not be here without the courage of those who sometimes struggle to believe the unbelievable, the truth, even when it seems very difficult to comprehend.

May Sir Nicholas Winton enjoy a long, long life with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren around him  May he be rewarded here on earth and someday by G-d in heaven for what he did.  And may every single one of us remember that in the times to come, there is no such thing as saving a single life – every life has a future larger than just one – and so, if you save a single life, it is as if you have saved the whole world.  You can, in fact, save the world – all you must do is feed someone who would starve otherwise, give refuge to someone who would die otherwise, tend the sick who would otherwise die – and you save a piece of the world who size cannot be calculated – the part becomes the whole.

Sharon

  

Moving On

Sharon August 24th, 2009

There are, of course, plenty of moments in any life in which one despairs of the hope that really substantial change could be made in our society.  You look around and doing what needs doing seems hopeless.  But then, there are the other moments.

On Friday, we attended Eli’s annual end of school year ceremonies.  Unlike most kids, Eli attends school year round, along with all of the other 60 or so children who are part of his school for kids with autism.  The yearly graduation and celebration of their achievements is held in August, as the summer winds up.

In many ways, this is no different than open parent day at any school. In other ways, it is.  Some of the kids have elaborate academic achievements to show off, some have none at all.  In either case, many of the most important things come in tiny increments – this year, someone’s son learned to say “Hello” without prompting.  This year, someone’s daughter had only half the tantrums of the year before, and no longer cries when someone makes a loud noise.  Someone’s 7 year old finally toilet trained.  A 10 year old learned to converse about something other than trains.  These are the accomplishments that matter most – the ones that get our kids a little closer to being able to live in the world with everyone else.  While Eli did very well academically this year, the big things for us were these – he can put on his own socks.  He can now choose between 3 or 4 items, without having to echo the last one – he can pick the one he wants.  He can color.  He can answer abstract yes or no questions.  For a child with little language and poor self-care skills, these are the essentials, not that he’s able to identify the countries of Europe on a map.

My guess is that if you don’t have a disabled kid in your life, this sound tremendously sad and limited and unfortunate, and the idea of being in a room full of autistic children not very appealing.  And in some measure, that’s probably a normal response to those who have never had close experience with children with disabilities – it is a little scary for those it is alien to, and the idea of being thrilled that your kid can put on his socks seems strange, probably as though we’re secretly grieving for the child that never was, but putting a brave face on it.

And this may well be true for some people. I once read a book about a boy with autism that began with something along the lines of “X’s birthday is the saddest day of the year…” and went to detail why this was so, because on their son’s birthday the author and her husband spent the day mourning the child that might have been.  I admit, I can’t tell you much more about this book, because the whole beginning so disgusted me that I didn’t read it. 

And I don’t think that’s a normative response.  That is, it may seem, if you don’t have a child with a disability in your life as though you would spend your whole life reorienting your compass, grieving what isn’t and faking your way through pride and happiness at the accomplishments – after all, if you hold these kids up to “normal” children, they seem so strange – how could anyone reorient their priorities to be truly happy about their kids being their kids, and truly proud of their accomplishments, not because they are all the kids can do and you need some pride, but because they deserve your pride and appreciation?

I can’t tell you how it happens, but for most people, it does. The idea of spending my time mourning that Eli is Eli, and not something else seems bizarre to me.  I have a beautiful, funny, sweet and healthy kid, who I adore.  He does what he does, and what he can, and his accomplishments are no less natural to appreciate than the accomplishments of Simon.  Simon is bright and funny, but not at all athletically talented, but the idea that I would watch him playing sports and sit there thinking that I wish he was better at it is just as alien as my watching Eli do his things, and wishing he was otherwise.  That’s just not how I, and I think most people, experience our children.  Moreover, it is, I think, mostly impossible to live in this world, where people lose far more important things than assumptions about what a child should be able to do, without being grateful for the child you have.

 Those 60 children were surrounded by hundreds of parents, grandparents and siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins who arrived to celebrate the accomplishments of the kids they love.  As we arrived at the school, the heavens opened up, and as we cheered each class and each child, thunder rolled and tried to overpower us, and failed.  And what is remarkable about this is that watching the people around me, some of whom I know, and some of whom I do not, I saw no ambivalence – perhaps there was some, perhaps someone was putting on a brave face.  But in aggregate, it is impossible to imagine that most of those cheers and that applause that drowned out the storm came with internal hesitance – you simply cannot make that much joy and that much noise and show that much pride and love constrained by a sense of loss.

And that’s what I think makes me hopeful.  The students in that school come from every walk of life and every community.  Their parents and families are well off and educated, and poor and not.  The parents are typical consumers and recent immigrants and weirdos like us.  The parents and families are black and white, asian and hispanic, from everywhere.  Autism is a reality all over the world, and in many communities – there’s no picking and choosing here.  And I have no doubt that every parent, every grandparent and aunt and uncle, every cousin and brother and sister have at some moment thought “why is she this way?”  or “why did it have to be autism?” 

And yet, each of them (or most, at least) has also passed through that moment – accepted the things they don’t get to choose, that children come as children come, and reoriented themselves to find the blessings and delight, the hope for the future and the promise in those children.  They may have asked “why us?”  But then they moved on, accepting that this is their life, the way it is, and that joy comes, not despite the things we do not choose, but as part of them – new joys, new things we never expected.  The grandparents are just as excited when Nita sleeps over, the parents just as happy when their child learns to read, and we change our expectations, adapt our hopes, and they are just as fulfilling as the hopes we had before.

I don’t think I have to paint a picture of the analogy between having a disabled child and knowing that your way of life is about to shift radically.  Most of these parents did not choose their fate, just as we did not fully choose ours.  Most of them expected something else, dreamed of a future that was different.  But instead of writing memoirs wallowing in the grief of disappointment, each grandparent, each parent, each brother, aunt, sister, uncle was able to say “We have Lily, and we’re happy for and because of her.”  There is a time and place for disappointment, and a time and place for moving on, and all of them, or nearly all of them were able to do so.  This bodes well for us.

Asked, most of these parents probably would have said they could not handle a child with autism.  I suspect I would have as well.  And yet, when a child with autism came their way, they were not only able to “handle” it, but to make a life of joy and beauty, and moments of pure happiness and celebration out of that reality.  It can happen to all of us – and almost all of us manage, not just to survive, but to find new ways to be happy and grateful and feel that they got lucky.  Looking at that cross-section of people in the room, it seemed very clear that what they can do, a much larger cross-section of people can also do.  Perhaps not all, but more than many of us credit can move past the loss of something we’d expected, and into the ordinary work of finding joy in your life as it is.

At the end of the celebration, they bring up the children who are graduating.  Some will go on to mainstreaming, some have aged out of the program, or are moving or attending different programs.  This year, one of my son’s classmates, ”David”, who is very much attached to Eli (and Eli to him) aged out.  It was a difficult thing – his parents struggled to find an appropriate placement, and David was very scared at the thought of leaving the school he’d attended for five years – transitions are difficult for these kids, and graduation day was a tough one.

David cried through the first part of the program – you could watch the tears rolling down his cheeks and see what a difficult day this was for him.  For a kid with autism, this could easily result in a tantrum, or simple panic – hundreds of people staring at you and making a lot of noise is a lot of stimulation at the best of times, and this was hardly that.  His teacher had confided she didn’t know if he’d make it when the time came for him to come up and face the crowd as a graduate – that in practice, he had refused to go up, and been panicked by the very thought, even just facing his classmates and teachers, at bringing school to an end so publically.

As the oldest child, and the last one called, we waited, in that hot, noisy, crowded room, with thunder rolling overhead as they called David’s name.  People applauded, and more noise was added.  The aide assigned to him, already crying at the thought of David’s leaving, led him down the aisle to the stage. He was holding her hand and looking scared as he walked, but he climbed up.  He landed on the center stage, facing away from the crowd, with his back to us.  He stood that way for a moment, and the school’s director moved to guide him, to remind him that he was supposed to face us all.  But David didn’t need it.  He took his certificate of graduation from her, and all by himself, he turned around, and smiled radiantly at all of us.  We cheered and applauded, yelled and called his name out loud.  And David took in all the noise, all the people filled with pride and joy, who cheered as you cheer someone who has won the marathon, who has passed his limits and gone on and done more than you thought they could, who has made you dream new dreams and hope for new things.  And David joined in all our joy for him, and  took a bow.

Sharon

Day's for Work, the Night's the Time to Go Dancing

Sharon June 17th, 2009

Way out on the ocean
The big ships hunt for whales
The Japanese have caught so many
That now they hunt for snails
My fisherman’s not greedy
He seems content to live
With the sun and the sand
And a net full of fish when the tide turns

Pull on the ropes, Seine haul fisherman
Never catches more than he knows
He can sell in a day;
Pull on the ropes, Seine haul fisherman
Day’s for work. Night’s the time to go dancing – Judy Collins (and Asher’s current favorite song, which is why it won’t leave my head ;-) )

I must admit, it is a really long time since Eric and I have actually gone out dancing.  Now I’ve never been one of those unusually graceful people, but I love to dance, and once upon a time, Eric and I used to go to the occasional club, and even ballroom dancing.  I’m hoping we’ll get back to it one of these days.

Not, however, that we don’t have our pleasures.  There is always so much work to do – on the farm, in front of our computers, with our kids, in our communities that it would be truly easy to allow the work to rise up and wash us away.  Indeed, a lot of the work is enormously enjoyable – we like the garden, we like milking and cooking and sometimes even cleaning. We like the community work, I love writing and Eric loves teaching, and of course, homeschooling and caring for the boys is a job.  And yet, in the aggregate, it adds up some days to feel like a lot of work.

A lot of days, after the boys are in bed, we crash on the couch, each of us reading our respective book.  Occasionally, we watch a movie and do a little light evening work – Eric brushes the dog while I knit mittens, or I pluck the angora bunnies while he oils a tool or replaces a string on one of his instruments.  Sometimes Eric, who is a gifted musician, plays for me, or we sit together and he plays and I sing.  Often we just put our feet up, intertwined and do nothing, quietly together.

It would be easy to spend every evening that way, and it is always tempting, when we are invited out somewhere, to say no.  Going out involves getting the kids in bed early, finding a sitter, getting ourselves cleaned up from the garden and decked out for public.  It involves most of all finding the energy to get up and go somewhere at the end of the day, even if it is just to a friend’s house to play games, out to dinner, or to some social event at a  local pub, much less dancing.  Some days, getting out of the house to play seems like a good bit of work.

And yet, when I go, when I force myself to simply stop, to say that even though I haven’t dug out of the pile of writing I was supposed to do, even though the garden isn’t fully mulched, even though there’s work waiting, even though we’re tired.  Part of it is that community stuff happens at the end of the day, when everyone is a little tired, but still pushes through to end the workday or week with laughter and a beer.   But mostly, it is that time for play is part of the reality of a life filled with work.  If you wait for the work to make the space for you to play, you’ll be waiting a long time.  The only choice is simply to say “ok, I need to go do something fun, much as I like the work, it can’t be everything.”  And so, we go.

One of my summer plans is that Eric and I actually do go dancing at least once.  I know I won’t go out with friends as often as I’d like, I know I won’t have them over as often as I’d like.  I know I won’t make it to every thing.  But I am trying to remember that play is part of what makes work fun.  The day is for work, and at least once in a while, the night’s the time to go dancing.

Sharon

  

The Welcome Table

Sharon December 13th, 2008

I’m going to sit at the Welcome Table – hallelujah!  I’ll sit at the Welcome Table one of these days.

I’m going to feast on milk and honey, hallelujah! I’ll feast on milk and honey one of these days.

All God’s children gonna sit together, hallelujah! All God’s children gonna sit together one of these days. -  Traditional Spiritual “River Jordan”

I don’t think it is overstating the case to say that a lot of us are feeling powerless right now.  Most of what’s going on in the world is not something we have power over.  Most of us rightly try not to let that stop us – that is, we try to claim what power we can as often as we can.  So even though we know it might not help, we talk to our representatives, we give money, we demonstrate.  But at some level, most of us are living through events that we are powerless to control, through a history that will sweep us along with it.  Frankly, this sucks.

All of us need to devote some energy to fighting battles that will probably be lost, simply because we have an obligation to fight the good fight.  But most of us can’t live on a steady diet of tilting at windmills – we also need to do work where we know we can accomplish something, and where we know we matter.  That’s why I talk about ordinary, simple things like dinner – which, of course, has already ceased to be simple for many people.  We need to win some, even as it seems like we are overwhelmingly losing much of what we value.

And here, I think is something that we can win, and desperately need - the recreation of the welcome table.  I think one of the things that most surprised me once I became an an adult with a table of her own and the capacity to put some food on it was how rarely most of us actually sit down and eat with our friends, our extended family, our community.  Heck, most of us don’t sit down together even as a whole family that often, much less invite guests.

I think part of the problem is that we are so terribly intimidated by the idea of “entertaining” in the Emily Post/HGTV sense.  All you have to do is to read the magazines in the supermarket check-out line around this time of year (the one month of the year we actually do have people over)  to realize that “entertaining” is one heck of a project – you have to have little bits of smoked salmon in cream puffs shells with lemon-thyme creme fraiche.  You are supposed to have fancy dishes and multiple courses and serve meals that cost enough that you have to take out another mortgage on your house.

Now there is a real place for the occasional lavish feast – it isn’t something we invented yesterday, the idea that you might save up the best foods for a celebratory display has a long history.  But so too does something other than “entertaining” – the sitting down together at a meal with others to whom you are tied. – just a plain and ordinary meal, which is celebratory not because of what’s in it, but because of who is at it.  And the more we watch famous people show off their homes, cleaned by underpaid minions and their elaborate buche de buttercreams (and yes, I think it is fun to make this stuff sometimes too), the harder it becomes for a lot of people to imagine eating a simple meal together.

They say that everyone has a mitzvah (Jewish good deed) that comes naturally to them – for me, hospitality is one of them.  I like nothing better than a crowd of people eating from my table.  But part of this is because I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t have to be fancy or complex – real hachnaset orchim (the mitzvah of hospitality) isn’t the creation of the most fabulous meals or the perfect environment – it is simply being welcoming.  The most perfect practitioner of this I know is my friend Joe, a synagogue friend.  I once joked that we were invading them, but at least we hadn’t all arrived at their home at 3 am, demanding food.  Joe knew I was joking, but looked at me with absolute seriousness, and said “If you did, we’d do our best to make you welcome.” 

All of us have different lives, and the creation of a welcoming table can take different forms.  Kathy Harrison uses “Another Place at the Table” as the title of her lovely book on foster parenting, on the project of welcoming children in need.  That’s one possibility.  And there’s a real place in the world for opening the welcome table in a world of need – I used to pack extra sandwiches when I worked in downtown Boston – it wasn’t much trouble for even a graduate student living on a pittance to make another peanut butter and jelly or hummus and pickle sandwich.  There were always homeless folks out, and it was a gift to be able to offer them a sandwich.  The park bench I used to sit on most often was transformed – it became a table at the moment that I was able to offer food to another person.

The welcome table can be as simple as inviting an elderly neighbor to dinner, or making sure that you really sit down with your sister in law once in a while and drink tea and eat something.  It can be welcoming an army of neighborhood children in for milk and cookies, or setting the church table for an army of people in need.  It can be dropping that extra casserole or pie over at the family that just had a baby or lost their job.  It can be taking the risk and asking someone to come eat with you – that step in a casual friendship that opens you, perhaps frighteningly, up for more.

We’ve lost the habit of the welcome table.  I once taught a Hebrew School class of fifth graders about Passover, and I asked them how many of them, when the Haggadah commands them to cast open their doors and call out “let all who are hungry come and eat” actually do so?  What, I asked them, would they do if someone actually tried to come in and sit down?  Overwhelmingly, these children in a comfortable suburb told me that they would never really open their doors, and that if a stranger tried to enter and eat, the would be afraid.  And there are perhaps some legitimate reasons for fear – but some even greater reasons for overcoming it.  We are people who have learned to fear the idea of casting open our doors to others.

There are things we can only understand about one another by sitting together for a meal.  Seated together, we learn about each other’s food culture – in fact, we create a food culture.  Until we eat together, there are intimacies we cannot share.  Eating together is a powerful way of tying our lives together.  Building community depends upon it – and because so many of us are too busy, or too afraid or intimidated or simply not in the habit, we lose community and intimacy in precisely the measure that we do not share food.  It is a starting point for most human connections.

Every faith that I know of has elaborate laws of hospitality, and it is worth remembering that these faiths – and the secular moral identities (for example the anarchist movement _Food Not Bombs_ takes this as a basic principle)  that share their basic ground grew up not in worlds of wealth and privelege but in times of vulnerability and uncertainty, when we were far poorer than we are now.  These moral systems do not emphasize hospitality because they are concerned with minutia, but because these are not minutia – the welcome table is simply the basis of strong communities and humane society.  The welcome table is a source of power of which we have control.  It is time to invite someone – or someone new – in to sit and eat.

Sharon

The First Garden Day

Sharon April 7th, 2008

I’m not real zen.  That is, I am not the sort of person who finds it easy to simply be in the moment.  Ok, I’m really awful at it.  Which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading Colin over at NoImpactMan so much – there’s a mindfulness that comes across in his posts that you simply will not find in mine. 

I’m very good at multitasking, and am often contemplating my next post or something I should be writing while I’m simultaneously sorting laundry and helping Isaiah write his name.  And while that ability makes parts of my life more manageable, I have a very hard time getting to a place where my mind and body are doing the same thing at once.  It is a useful skill when it is wanted – but it doesn’t have an off button.  Sometimes all that stuff, all that thinking about the next thing and the next gets tiresome, and I wouldn’t mind if it would simply get a little quieter in my brain.  I’m told meditation techinques could help me with this – and it is something that’s on the 50,000 item list of “things to do when I get a chance.” 

Today, however, I am reminded of why all this noise in my brain does not drive me stark raving mad.  I had almost forgotten, in the months since I touched dirt out in its natural habitat, what it is like to go into the garden.  And then I got to do it. 

Today it was *finally* warm enough and dry enough to plant out in the garden – pansies along the side of the house, peas, mustards, tatsoi, mache and spinach in the main garden.  And so we trooped out, the three boys and I (Eli was at school, Daddy off teaching astronomy) with our respective tools (Asher had a spoon and bucket, Simon a trowel, Isaiah a small garden claw (not sharp), me my big pointy serious one), our seeds, inoculant for the peas, greensand and kelpmeal to feed the plants.  It was rather a production, and we made a proper bit of pomp and circumstance about this first venture. 

And then we were out there, and getting dirt under our nails (and in our hair in Asher’s case).  And all of a sudden, things went quiet.  I don’t mean the children were quiet – they weren’t.  We discussed earthworms and why plants need minerals and what molecules are.  They were doodling about and being their usual noisy selves.  But instead of spending the time working in my head on an essay about what to do with your appliances once you don’t need them anymore, I just gardened.  I just touched and smelled, put my hands into the soil, and loosened it.  I was just there.  I could hear myself again in the quiet.  And I remembered – I garden for food, but also, I garden because it is the best way into myself that I know of.

In springtime, we say a lot of schechechayanu.  This is the Jewish blessing for things you haven’t done in a long time, as they come around in cycles again.  We say the blessing at each holiday and special occasion, when we first seen the trees bloom and the birds return.  And the kids and I said one today, for the planting of the first seeds of our season. For me, it was a moment of gratitude, as the season of raucous, noisy life begins again – and the season of quiet starts too.

Sharon

« Prev - Next »