Victor Davis Hanson recently wisely observed that working on his farm balanced mental work with physical work to leave him more whole, or words to that effect. There is truth to this, that all mind or all body makes for a lopsided individual. We have been created with both, and perhaps it is also true that one influences the other, even corrects or directs the other, in some miraculous complementarity.
As I type these words, I am combining, to a degree, both faculties, the physical fingers placing my thoughts onto the keyboard and onto the screen and then, with the tap of a tab, with the touch of “Publish,” my intellectual fingerings fly into a cloud, our word for something some of us can’t visualize, involving wave lengths or something that abbreviates to WIFI or Internet.
And so as I worked in the back yard the last few days, I thought of VDH’s words and appreciated the ache of my back, the movement of the hose as I unwound and rewound the coils, allowing the water through the long yellow snake of plastic. I really must get one of those trolleys, I thought, realizing the hose had become a workout on its own. But it was good to be outside (in the shade), good to breathe the air deeply, good to clean things up a bit, good to see such direct result of my labor.
I felt grounded by the ground, by the dirt, by the soil, by the plant in the pot drinking up the water from the hose. My thoughts reminded me of Francis Etheredge, probably the most brilliant and under-appreciated Catholic poet of the century, and his garden in back and how he created a book of poems and essays from his relationship to the earth and his relationship to God the creator through the earth. An Unlikely Gardener is soon to be released, and I was honored to write the Foreword, my son Tom contributing an endorsement.
My thoughts then drifted to Tom’s love of the earth and landscaping. He too is grounded, balanced by his work, sculpting God’s garden as he once called it. The vast intricacies of life can be seen in the outdoors, whether sculpted or not, tamed or wild. We are a part of creation, and our bodies respond to the world into which we are born. In some sense we are wild creatures, or part of us remains wild, and we yearn for the conversation we have when we step outside. It is a conversation with an old friend, nature, sunlight, clouds, rain, and a conversation with the creator of all this splendor.
Perhaps it was St. Francis of Assisi (feast day last Wednesday) who tapped my shoulder this week, pointing out the birds of the air, the scuttling jack rabbit, the formal-stepping quail that cross the patio from one side to the other as if it were a great dry route across a desert, from greenery to greenery. Curious things, quail. They can fly but choose not to most of the time; instead they prance prettily in order, scuttling to keep up, groups of ten to twelve, sometimes babies, sometimes older teens ready to leave and start their own family. And so it goes. Life.
What prompted my wild excursion into the backyard? It was the pigeons who had nested on the roof, actually building nests in the chimney, covering the roof tiles with splashes of white. We worried what kind of takeover this was, and while I love to watch them fly, soaring in formation (truly an amazing wonder), we decided to take the matter in hand and hire experts to see what was what on the roof. By the end of the day, they had removed the pigeons and all calling cards, previous homes (alas), and set up some deterrents that have worked so far. I’m glad to say they still soar in our skies, lighting lightly on my patio, for a drink from the planter basin, but not for long.
There was still a necessary cleanup of the patio, and this called me into the sunlight from the shade of my house, pulled me out of my meditative reading and writing, and into the dance with the natural world.
We are curious creatures, you and I, made in the image of God Almighty. Little mortals, made immortal in his image. We sense this from a deep place within, the heart or the soul or the mind. We sense we are made for something else, and our yearning for happiness and beauty and goodness and justice is planted in this place within. Our yearning for something that is fleeting in this earthly world gives us the hints and guesses that grounds T.S. Eliot in his magnificent Four Quartets.
I don’t live on a farm as VDH does, but he’s profoundly correct. We are body and soul, and we are grounded from our flights of fancy by the real world all around us. It is a real world of matter that matters and lives and dies, crumbles to nothing, having bloomed just for us. We have little power to control the climate and its changes, but we can protect ourselves from its sharper elements, its heat and its cold, as we pretend to be groundskeepers here on planet Earth. For as I cleaned up in the backyard, and as I do the same inside keeping a house clean, I know it is a recurring endeavor, that what I have done this week will be undone next week, and certainly will need redoing again and again in the course of a year, a lifetime.
It is a dance with life, I suppose. And I’m glad to be dancing, listening and learning the tune the stars sing, to one day follow the song through the galaxies to the heavenly city of Jerusalem, to dance with our Lord of love, our creator and redeemer.
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 