What is more perfect than comparing our life to a garden?
A garden flourishes and dies, so as in life.
Bird by Bird- Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, is an insightful, humorous, and often touching work, guiding writers and wannabes to put pen to paper courageously.
There is a section where Annie is considering one of her characters to be a lover of gardening. She says this about gardens:
"…the garden did not start out as metaphor. It started out as paradise. Then, as now, the garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things. The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe. It’s part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food. ….."
"And what a wonderful relief every so often to know who the enemy is — because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time. And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth and growth and beauty and danger and triumph — and then everything dies anyway, right? But you just keep doing it."
I love that. It’s heartbreaking yet encouraging, a description of life manifest.
We first start as newborn buds ready to flower. Unable to do this independently, we are fed and watered by our caregivers, nourished in many ways.
We stumble into our first steps. Learn to hold a spoon and navigate it to our mouths.
We manage to survive elementary school, then high school, and for some, college. All the while, we were having the time of our lives, even with all of the struggles. We have learned to be stronger than the weeds, live through droughts and storms.
Unlike a dependent zucchini or a daisy, the good news is that we are able, once grown, to provide for ourselves.
Hopefully, we survive, thrive, and have families of our own to tend to, support, and remove the weeds to allow the sunshine in.
I, like many of you, am a thriver and a survivor. I have managed to pick up the pieces after divorce, supporting my children on my own. I’ve endured the death of my 36-year-old son and managed to be grateful for the years I had with him.
Just as a garden’s flowers and vegetables are harvested at the peak of ripeness, so are humans delivering their goods to the world. When the crops are spent, they return to the earth. When our time has come, we, too, will pass on.
Yes, life is way more complicated than a garden — still, the metaphor persists.
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