Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

In Praise of Gardening

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(A hellebore from my garden on Easter Sunday last year)

Here’s a lyrical passage from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Gardening provides rewards far beyond the vegetable paycheck. It gets a body outside for some part of every day to work the heart, lungs, and muscles you wouldn’t believe existed, providing a healthy balance to desk jobs that might otherwise render us chair potatoes. Instead of needing to drive to the gym, we walk up the hill to do pitchfork free weights, weed-pull yoga and Hoe Master.

It is also noiseless in the garden: phoneless, meditative, and beautiful. Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour. I inhale the oxygen of their thanks.

 Like my friend, David, who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hoe in the fencepost. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle.

Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of being out there in the mud and fresh green growth.

Funny, gardening used to be a deep joy at the centre of my life when I lived in America. Gardening–even more than writing which then had anxiety and uncertainty and worry associated with it.

I have never really got into gardening in England. Part of it is that I moved from a good-sized plot in America—half an acre to a massive garden: 1.5 acre. In the US, I could look and tend everything I planted in an hour. Here, it’s not possible. Here, my garden feels overwhelming.

And England is more fertile than Virginia, and everything goes feral in spring and summer, and keeping up seems a forlorn hope.

And, so the garden has become more Roy’s than mine, and when I go out, I gulp. His idea of gardening is getting things to grow. Mine is getting things to grow, but a garden as pretty as a National Trust garden.

However, the real reason I have stopped gardening is that I don’t have a slot in my schedule for it. Leo Babuata of Zen Habits says that when it comes to forming a new habit, it’s important to find a trigger. Do it just before something. Something that reminds you that it is time to practice your new habit.  I haven’t yet found a slot for gardening.

England’s going through a cold snap now, so I am going to tell myself that if I do it just once or twice a week, it will be better than not at all!

 

An Immensely Abundant Universe. Seeds as a Solution to World Hunger

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vegetable suppersweet tomato plants

Abundance (credit)

Barbara Kingsolver’s describes her marvellously productive garden in her memoir of a gardening year, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

We spent the July 4th weekend applying rock lime to the beans and eggplants to discourage beetles, and tying up the waist-high tomato vines to four-foot cages and stakes.

In February, each of these plants had been a seed the size of this o.

In Mary, we’d set them into the ground as seedlings smaller than my hand.

In another month, they would be taller than me, doubled back and pouring like Niagara over their cages, loaded down with fifty or more pounds of ripening fruit per plant.

This is why we do it all again every year. It’s the visible daily growth, the marvellous and unaccountable accumulation of biomass that makes for the hallelujah of a July garden.

Fuelled only by the stuff they drink from air and earth, the bush beans full out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt.

Cucumber and melon plants begin their lives with suburban reserve, posted discreetly apart from one another like houses in a new subdivision, but under summer’s heat they sprawl from their foundations into disreputable leafy communes.

The days of plenty suddenly fell upon us.”|

What an amazing description of abundance, fuelled by…nothing really, seed, soil, water, air…

Can anyone read this and doubt we live in an abundant universe, a benevolent universe blessed by God?

* * *

And yet, eighteen people die of starvation each minute, eighteen while I have written and you have read this.

Large-scale systemic failures, war and corruption, environmental plunder, degradation and collapse all play a role in this.

* * *

Our friends who worked with Heidi Baker described the widespread hunger in Mozambique.

Yet Mozambique, according to my research has rich and extensive natural resources, five rivers, heavy rainfall.

My friends described going through the bush with trucks of food, and people fighting like wolves for the food.

Would it not have been more effective to also distribute seeds?

Seeds: would that solve the problem of hunger on the micro-level, despite systemic problems of distribution, environmental degradation and global warming?

“Whoever could make two ears of corn grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels.

I do believe it.

I believe with Heidi Baker that there is always enough, both for the reasons she gives, and because of the abundance God has encoded in seeds: dozens of tomatoes, thousands of apples over generations from a single seed.

Vegetables can be grown in plastic bags or plastic bottles, or using hydroponics in minimal soil.

Teaching people to grow vegetables: on a micro-level, could this be a simple, overlooked solution to world hunger?

 

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

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  Our family listened to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible on tape on our summer holiday, and were engrossed by it.

It’s the story of an American Baptist family, the Prices, who go out to the Congo to convert “the heathen.”

The father, Nathan, simple-minded and fanatical, is a prototypical “ugly American,” who scarily conflates the American way of doing things and the Christian way. Despite the remonstrances of the local help, he insists on planting his garden in the American way in the soil itself, instead of in the Congolese way, in ridges. The rain washes it all away.

For him, the be-all and end-all of religion is baptism by total immersion. This puts him at odds with the villagers, who are terrified of the river: crocodiles have eaten their children.

Nathan Price browbeats his wife into submission, by tongue-lashings and physical violence. She walks through the Congo in a daze, willing herself forward, one step at a time, dreaming of Georgia. And most of his four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Ada and Ruth-May, would rather be anywhere than in the Congo.

The essential wrongness of transporting unwilling children across the globe to share in their parents’ missionary endeavours is made blindingly obvious. Nothing, I think, can compensate for the trauma and disruption to your own children. They are your primary responsibility.

One of my favourite aphorisms is Mary McCarthy’s “Religion is only good for good people.” Poor Nathan Price is so determined to succeed at converting the Congolese that he is gradually alienated from his wife, his four daughters, the Congolese, of course, and ultimately his own sanity. A tragic anti-hero, he goes on in his own pig-headed way until the book’s searing close, blind to the anguish of those around him while his eyes are fixed on the prize, a converted Congolese village.

Fortunately, Kingsolver creates a foil–Brother Fowles, a non-dogmatic Yankee missionary who respects what there is to respect in Congolese traditions, and quietly helps the Congolese .

As he memorably says, repeatedly, “There are Christians, and Christians.”

The book is written in five voices, that of the five Price women, each of them linguistically differentiated. An epilogue catches up with them, twenty years later. Their characters have proved their destinies.

Barbara Kingsolver herself lived in the Congo as a child with her American parents. She says she has waited 30 years for the wisdom to write this book. And it’s a splendid one!