Dirt

My younger son and I bought vegetable and flower seeds yesterday.  We are planning a garden.  He has decided this is something he wants to do, along with his decision to participate more often in a homeless ministry through our church.  The metaphor still applies: the seeds he plants with each cup of coffee or hot cocoa he hands out with a smile and well wishes might some day begin to grow in that person.  I am in awe of this eleven-year-old, who helps me be cognizant of the state of my dirt.

Last night I had a long, somewhat painful, very beautiful conversation with my fifteen year old, who frequently flirts with suicidal thoughts.  We talked about control, and about the fact that even when you know someone can benefit from something you have to offer, that person doesn't always want what you've got.  And how determination, perseverance, will very often be the only thing we have to offer and the very thing that is most needed.  How often do we fail when we refuse to quit?  We broke through a layer of striated rock that was cemented when I left my marriage.  It has been difficult over the years to get around to breaking up all the rocks, which are really just compacted soil, so something worthwhile would grow.  Last night, when he hugged me and told me he loves me, I felt a lot of things loosen.

This has been the message in my life of late: is my dirt loamy and granular, or hard and cracked in random places?  In my work with students, another metaphor has emerged: when we can be at peace, without desire to control, our lives work in harmony with nature and we affirm life and its right to assert itself.  When we seek to impose our will on nature, and therefore on others, we are cruel and difficult and loathsome.  I want something I can't have right now, and though it hurts, I'm letting it go.  I feel better about that than if I forced my way into the situation, which I could easily do, and took what I want.  I feel the dirt loosening that had begun to grow hardened.  I feel my brow relaxing, my mind unknot, the tears washing my dirty face.  Rick's message today was to do nothing - to not seek to accomplish or control, but to just be.  To mind the gardens with which we've been entrusted.  The prayer that followed was about becoming close again to the earth - to feel its faint murmuring through my bare feet, to allow my mind to be taken up and away from me so that something worthwhile might fill the cobwebbed void it occupies.

I have no answers.  My heart hurts, so I guess that means I'm alive.  I have my tools and I'm working.  Sometimes I don't know why, but I'm working.

Shalom.