Gardening was one of the biggest passions of our lives for the last seven years that we lived in America, and had a half acre garden, this . We planted thousands of bulbs (literally), a dozen fruit trees, dozens of hellebores, shade-loving plants, perennials. I used to know a lot about all sorts of plants, and hopefully still do.

And when we moved to England after 17 years in America, one of the top things in my wish list was a big garden. I was praying for an acre. We landed up buying a house with an acre and a half of garden. Though the house was charming

it was the limitless potential of the garden which got me

See what I mean?
I more or less decided to buy the house before we entered it. The salesman never had an easier sale.

However, an acre and a half has proved to be a lot more work than half an acre. Duh! And it has proved overwhelming to us, and it makes us sad that we’re always so behind, because we love beauty, we love gardening, we love plants, we love watching things grow, we love being out of doors, and we love the sound of the birds.
And because it was rapidly became overwhelming, I found myself going out to garden less and less often while it became like Sleeping Beauty’s forest.

For instance, I went out to garden this Sunday, after um… um…. more months than I care to remember.
* * *

In America, the garden was our family’s life. We would go out there as soon as the children came home from school and often spend three or even four hours there. There were dozens of little flower beds, we had a pond, fruit trees, swings, slides, a tree house, a rope ladder, a sand pit, a climbing frame, a fountain, bird houses and feeders, hummingbird feeders, a hammock, an outdoor wendy house,  lots of stuff for the girls and their friends to amuse themselves with. Smiling sun shaped bird houses, little terra cotta animals, wind chimes. It was magical. I would lose track of time, pray, forget my sorrows, such as they were.

Now, when I go out, there are so many things I am behind with, so many Honey Do’s for Roy who is stronger and fitter, but who doesn’t like “being bossed,” that it all gets rather stressful. So, over the last five years we’ve gardened in fits and starts which isn’t the way to garden, or do anything else.
* * *

But this time, I am going to persevere with gardening. I am making a little trail for myself, going from bed to bed, weeding, pruning… I don’t get the bed perfect, just a whole lot better, and then, next day, have another savage bash at it. Am getting to more beds each day.

“Little and often” is the best gardening motto that I have heard.
* * *

If there is a fountain of youth, I wonder if it is gardening? It keeps you supple, slightly stronger, and it is great for mental health to rest the mind, breathe fresh air, and listen to the birds. To bend double to the ground. To notice the rhythms of the earth.

I wonder why people stop gardening as they age. Maybe, they never get themselves out after a savage winter. After all, I went out for the first time on March 6th. Maybe, they are uncertain on their feet after a fall.

I had a traumatic fall in Costa Rica in 2003, which was misdiagnosed there as a break. The doctor didn’t speak English, nor I Spanish. My leg was in a cast, and I flew back early to the States in a wheelchair. Once I got to see a doctor–the fall was on Christmas Eve– it turned out that it was a savage sprain, not a break, and putting it in a cast was the very worst thing to do.

The ankle is still weak, and I have never been quite as confident hiking up mountains with the kids, or on icy roads or slushy paths. That’s how aging works. And I am still in my forties!!
Psalm 18:36 “You broaden the path beneath me, so that my ankles do not turn.” I pray this heart-feltly whenever I come across it. I have never broken a bone, and pray never to. I also pray never to sprain my ankle again, since my recovery was so slow and imperfect.

On the other hand, there are uses to walking with a limp. Ask Jacob!

Guest post by Roy Mathias

Perhaps in Lent I should not be writing about the different ways food can make us feel good.  So let me start with

Fasting.   It can make you feel terrific after a couple of days, but I’m sure can have too much of good thing.  Fasting is also the body’s natural response to some illnesses.

Comfort food.    This is usually a childhood favourite, warm, hearty, rich, simple, and usually inexpensive;  spaghetti and meatballs, Irish stew, fish and chips, pizza (my favourite), chicken tikka masala, bangers and mash, or a full English breakfast, followed apple crumble topped with ice cream if more comfort is needed .

Organic food.  Of course, for most of human history,all food was of  necessity organic.   The industrial revolution brought chemical fertilisers and pesticides and greatly increased harvests.  Organic agriculture ha recently become fashionable, but Sir Albert Howard, writing in the 1940, based on experiments started in 1910 says

“This law is true for soil, plant, animal, and man: the health of these four is one connected chain.  Any weakness or defect in the health of any earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding links, until it reaches the last, namely, man.  The widespread vegetable and animal pests and diseases, which are such a bane to modern agriculture, are evidence of a great failure of health in the second (plant) and third (animal) links of the chain.  The impaired health of human populations (the fourth link) in modern civilised countries is a consequence of this failure in the second and third links. This general failure in the last three links is to be attributed to failure in the first link, the soil: the undernourishment of the soil is at the root of all.”

In “Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease” he presents the remarkable example of his uninoculated oxen, fed  purely organic high quality feed  living on his organic farm in Pusa, Bihar (India), resisting resisting infection with foot-and-mouth disease from the cattle in neighbouring farms with which they mingled.

Surely eating organic makes us feel better?

Home grown.  Our first home grown tomato of the season is ceremonially quartered and shared by the family.  The taste is nothing special, but there’s pride and pleasure in the plucking.

Fair trade.  Buying and eating fair trade makes us feel good as the pounds we are spend are doing good to a few farmers and are not  encouraging ruthless bottom-line economics.  COOP,  established by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 (based on the Rochdale Principles that are used in different forms by co-operatives worldwide), is  well known for its ethical trading and leadership in fairtrade.  In a major initiative they supported over 10,000 smallholder tea farmers organise into co-operatives, and so get fair trade status and power to negotiate higher prices.  Here’s a picture of a Kenyan tea plantation where some of the COOP tea comes from. In fact, you can join the revolution that was started over 150 years ago, and help out your local area and further afield.

British Library

Nothing stays constant, not even words. Their means slips, slides, changes.


In church, children sing, “Our God is an awesome God.” Awesome now means an all-round cool guy, a marvellous person. It used to mean that which inspires awe and reverence.


Our semi-slang term “cool,”  a few decades old, borrows meaning from the French sang-froid,, literally cold-blood, or calm and  composure.


“Neat” no longer means tidy but cool.


“Nice” is probably the one word which has evolved the most.  It meant  “foolish, stupid, senseless,” in the late 13 century derived from the Latin nescius “ignorant,” from ne- “not” + stem of scire “to know.” The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adjective moving from “timid” (pre-1300); to “fussy, fastidious” (late 14c.); to “dainty, delicate” (c.1400); to “precise, careful” (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early) to “agreeable, delightful” (1769); to “kind, thoughtful” (1830). By 1926, it was pronounced by Fowler to be “too great a favourite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.”
“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should I not call it so?” “Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk; and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything.” [Jane Austen, “Northanger Abbey”]

Sometimes, the evolution of language makes it hard for us to read a piece as the author intended it. W.B. Yeats in his great poem “Lapis Lazuli” writes
All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
Yeats meant gallantly and inexorably cheerful when he wrote “gay.” Today, the words would be read in a very different sense. 

Nowadays much of the evolution of English is in the direction of the watering down of language. People use the noun “epic” as an adjective–“an epic fail,” and words like immense or massive, when they mean “not too bad.” This is now even apparent in Britain where understatement has traditionally been the norm, and people describe their well-being by the phrase, “not too bad,” whether they have just won the lottery, or lost their wallet. 

The exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices (www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish) is now on at the British Library but only until April 3, 2011. (Free)

Experience some of it without leaving your computer.  Try  the Quiz http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/quiz.html,  (I got 6/6 on the medium level, and 5/6 on the egghead level.)
Record your voice to add to the collection of English being gathered from across the globe. (http://www.bl.uk/evolvingeenglish/maplisten.html).  
  Listen to English as it is spoken around the world.
Tweet your comments, or quiz results,  using #evolvingenglish (link the #tag to http://bit.ly/dmIoPm)
Enjoy!

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Image–Neurocritic

No, I am not giving up anything to make there be less of me. I have had such a fraught relationship with food for many years that I now think of food more in terms of health, and life-long dietary modification rather than a short-term abstinence (with a longer term rebound, perhaps).


No, I am going to give up a minor addiction. I have broken a serious coffee addiction, and milder addictions to chocolate and sugar, and thought I was addiction free, but no.


The mild addiction I have, which I hadn’t realized was one until recently, is a mild internet addiction. 


Quaerentia, (which is the fanciful blog name of a priest called Mark Meynell who writes a very interesting literary/Christian blog) has an article called Webwise.


In it, he talks of 
“ADDICTIONS – Surfing is addictive: like a infinitely-channelled TV where you keep flicking over in the vain hope that there may be something more interesting to look at. Furthermore, you can get sucked into thinking that just because information is available, it is necessarily important or useful. [NB Wurman’s Information Anxiety (Indianapolis: QUE 2001):  I haven’t even mentioned the more obvious porn or gambling addictions that the internet can feed. I’m just talking about plain old surfing.”


I co-own a small publishing company with my husband, I am an active blogger on lightly monetized blogs, I keep in touch with many people. So, much that is interesting to me comes via the internet–business news, money earned, blog comments, emails.


And when there is nothing of interest–which is, of course, the case for more minutes than not?


I surf. Click to the New York Times for something fascinating, to the Guardian, to Christianity Today, to my own blog, to Lesley’s blog, other friends’ blogs, blogs on my blog roll, to Facebook, to my personal email, to our business email.  A little internet fox’s trail. All this will yield something of interest probably.  And then, when it is time to get up, exercise, do some housework, stretch and do some real writing, I can repeat the little fox’s trail. Find something else of interest or distraction. And then do a last email check before I get up. Some has come in, deal with it. And then….


I do most things with a timer on, count up or count down, and when I look at the timer, I am frequently baffled. Did I really need to read the New York Times article on the 87 year old billionaire planning his 125 birthday, or the global cash flow from immigrant women in domestic work abroad (half the GDP of the Philippines, incidentally, 35% of Tajikistan) or how men’s sexual prospects are increasing even as their job prospects diminish?  http://www.slate.com/id/2286240// Apparently, I thought so at the time.
                                                                        * * *


Now, if I am to be a writer as well as a blogger–and write more books rather than just blogs–I obviously need to break this time-consuming addiction.


And I now think that with soul perturbations as with bodily dysfunctions, much time can be saved by getting a correct diagnosis. 


Jesus had one in John 6, Unless you eat my flesh, and drink my blood, you have no life in you. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will live because of me.


So, this is temporary emptiness of soul. I am trying to fill it with blogs, and newspapers, and magazines, and news, and twitter and facebook checks and rubbish.


Will it work? Will it fill my soul? No. I hope not. It cannot. 
                                                                              * * * 


So since the lights came on after reading Quaerentia’s article, I close my laptop when I notice I am aimlessly surfing, and pray for the Holy Spirit. 


I often think of a lecture illustration I once saw. A woman filled a goblet with car keys, and house keys medals and coins and notes and necklaces and rings and bling and there was still room. Still emptiness.


She then poured water–and every atom of space was filled.


So that is what I need–not distraction, not surfing, but the water of the Holy Spirit filling my restless soul.


And fortunately, Jesus promises that his Father WILL give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks for it.


And I know that is true because I have asked many times. And received.


As I will do again and again when I find myself aimlessly surfing on dry ground, with a laptop on my lap.




                  
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