My Fathers’ garden, like every garden, was full of miracles. By Father I mean my two Fathers; corporal and Heavenly.
Gardens were more alive in my neck of the rain forest when I was a boy in late 50’s, early 60’s, prolific with bees, insects, (incl., once, an enormous, 9-inch, blue butterfly), garter snakes, and abundant frogs, (incl., once, a rare, bright green, branch-leaping frog). We always had a cat or kittens and the neighborhood dogs ran free.
As a child the garden seemed no more miraculous than anything else – it was the way things were and the way they should be.
My father spent most of his non-hockey watching time in his garden or with his stamp collection. Not great at speaking English I suspect that hockey bonded him with his co-workers.
My Father’s garden featured beautiful, aromatic, ornamental flowers of every type, including tiger, among other, lilies, roses, irises, and, a personal favorite, the purple clematis that interwove the trellis that my father put up against the side of the garage.
It stood among the strawberries that lined the garage for which we would have to compete with the birds when they were ripe. A long row of juicy raspberry bushes lined the east side of our yard. We also had a bush of gooseberries that I didn’t care for but would evoke fond emotional memories of home in Latvian expatriates.
Eating fresh peas from pods was a normal thing as was eating ripe prune plums, apples from 2 different trees and pears from 2 different trees. One of the pear trees challenged my father and me in trying to get its mostly vertical branches to grow horizontally because fruit only grows on horizontal branches. The older pear tree grew quite tall and I climbed it, and the plum tree, frequently. The taller tree was my (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) submarine and the, center, top, periscope was a perch that would tenuously hold my weight as the wind swayed me back and forth affording me an above-the-roof view of our domain.
We had primordial ferns and ivies and more types of ornamental plants, bushes, and trees than I care to mention. Flowers abounded. We had three rock gardens, and an enormous shady rock to sit or play on in the shade.
One summer a bug-eating plant was a big hit with the other kids.
One year my father let me keep the money from the bumper crop of $5 per basket Beefsteak tomatoes that I sold from the card table in front of our house. It was my first feeling of wealth back when I was trying to get by on a 25 cents per week allowance.
This garden proved to be too much for me to maintain as an inheritance and, at one time, I hired gardeners to seriously cut it back. I was told, without asking about it, by a psychic, that I’ve been a gardener of some renown in past lives and so have been given my twisted spine to encourage alternative pursuits. I was also told that this chronic back pain, as well as chronic GI pain, both right in the vicinity of my anatomical fulcrum, are there in order that I might learn to overcome ‘wretchedness’. No matter what I do I must bear these secondary drivers for depression for the rest of my days.
The result is my magnum opus new book:
If I were gardener these days cultivating the flora would include playing short high-frequency bird songs and filling my heart with love for them and the appreciation for how they give their all for humankind, in a Christ-like fashion, some of them just to beautify our table tops and mantles for a short period.
This absolute devotion to service is just one more thing that we can learn from them.
Who is smarter – us, or plants?
“When you choose the paradigm of service, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift.” – Oprah Winfrey
According to Edgar Cayce ‘Service’, rather than being a behavioral Fruit of the Spirit, is an oft-miraculous Gift of the Spirit. It aligns us with God.
How often do you read an actual lesson on how to miracle?
What will learning it create?
