Daily Life

The Garden. Renewing The Human Spirit; A Place To Contemplate Mother Nature

By Jim ⋅ May 17, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

The Earth we human beings share together is a precious gift and we have a high responsibility to care for it, nurture it and protect it from harm. The earth is our friend and we all ought to treat it well. For example, The Gift of soil is amazing. It possesses everything we need when it receives the rain and sun it needs. It contains all the minerals we need and gives us the nutritious plants we depend on.  Many of us, who grew up in close contact with the land – and hadn’t yet become greedy and cynical – still hold in our hearts a deep love for what the ground beneath our feet can give us. All too often we take it for granted.

And that brings me to the subject of this little essay.

Those of us who love to garden, have held onto our love for the soil, the sun and the rain, because
we see – year after year -  the rewards we reap in the form of clean, health-giving food, planted by us, grown by our own efforts and reaped by our own hands. We know too, that none of this could take place without the intervention of some higher power. Whether that higher power is the Christian God, or the Islamic or Jewish God, or all three…or whether it is collection of lesser gods, which together make up the power of Nature we cannot truly know. We do know this – that we think of Nature as a Feminine Spirit. That’s why we refer to Nature as a Mother. She nurtures us and is vital to our survival as a species. So far, in the great scheme of things, as the decades and centuries have unfolded, we have also come to know and even dread the great power of Nature. The storms, the floods, and the bitter cold of winter. But we have also come to know the incomparable joy of spring – they all speak to Nature’s power and those who contemplate it, are in awe.
I was thinking about all this the other day, as I puttered in my garden. I watched the seeds I’d planted begin to grow into delicate shoots, green and tall. I thought – we ignore this Natural World at our peril. We are an integral part of it. If we abuse this World, we shortchange ourselves. This summer as we watch our gardens grow and admire the lush crops of wheat and corn and other grains begin to mature in farmers’ fields…I thought…

hmmmm…

perhaps we ought to pause and give thanks for the gifts of soil, rain and sun and remember to be humble before Mother Nature’s goodness.