Digging up Old Roots

Exploring my Soul(soil) Care and Spiritual Direction Journey (plus a poem and a song at the end)

(if you listen to the recording I apologize for the cough)

Photo by Juan Aguirre on Unsplash

FYI all words are human typed, edited, conjured, and my own. FAI

Some of you may know I am taking part in a Soul Care and Spiritual Direction Cohort. Choosing to participate felt like the natural next step after letting go of so much religious baggage, not to mention frustration and further disillusionment as religion climbed deeper into bed with the viper of politics. If I hadn’t experienced who God really is I’d close the book for good on the whole absurd and sordid mess.

This said, I continue my pursuit of goodness, and God-ness, and frequently turn to God’s first and best creation for solace, direction, expositions on truth, and practical lessons for living. Most of these are simple-don’t poison what you love, tend don’t destroy, guide don’t force, marvel don’t manipulate, and share. There’s more I’ve learned but this is a start.

What follows is an excerpt from a submission I was required to make before attending the most recent cohort gathering. I’ve edited it to fit here, and to keep some of what is deeply personal protected.

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My office chair is uncomfortable, as it has been the last three times I’ve sat down to write about my spiritual journey over the last few months. The biggest difference is this time I am also feeling the sting of a thorn raked ankle and am nursing a bandaged thumb; both gardening casualties and a result of the need to clear my head to find words that would fit on the page.

Even now I am looking longingly out my ground floor office window wishing I was out in the newly returned warmth with my hands in the soil, or wielding secateurs instead of a keyboard, keenly aware of the parallels in my gardening procrastinations and the changes experienced in my so called spiritual life.

I’m in what I am calling the soil stage these days— adding compost and nutrients to my gardens and my life in the hopes of building a more wholesome, more nutrient rich place to plant. There is a watering trough (now up to four since originally writing this) on my deck to grow vegetables; it is the only way to have any kind of harvest because deer, rabbits, and other hungry woodland creatures wandering by devour anything they can reach. Harvest here is a loose term because it is never large, but always a delight, especially the sweet peas my grandson will eat warm off the vine-which is reason enough to grow anything. Right now though, the soil is exhausted and needs to be completely refreshed, kind of like my own life-spiritual and otherwise. The last few years have brought slim harvests with weak fruit; my nutrient reserves are depleted and like beating the proverbial dead horse, I’ve continued to overwork old soil. Outdated narratives, outgrown doctrines-the old rules don’t apply any more, yet I continue attempting to grow something, anything, in a substrate that no longer has anything to offer.

Just because I had been told this is how things have always been done, in multiple ways I might add, no longer means it is the way to keep doing it. What may have worked years ago doesn’t make sense anymore. Any farmer worth his salt knows to rotate crops and when to allow a field to go fallow and rest. Without these practices soil dies and crops fail. Fallowness is something frowned upon. Busy is better. More is better. Achievement matters. Powering through is imperative. Where I come from the busier you are “for God” the better and if you are doing it for a religious institution that was even more better (I know it’s bad grammar, but it is also bad practice). After decades of this gauntlet I have nothing “good” left, no nutrients, no oxygen to grow anything.

When you begin to rework the ground, or planting bin, you find all kinds of unnecessary detritus that has found its way into its makeup. Old chicken bones, rocks, bits of glass, old cans, long lost spoons, half of an old plastic Easter egg-odd items that once held a bit of value but have become useless and impediments to good, strong soil. Coming into this season I was carrying a lot of useless impediments, and some pretty urgent feeling detritus that was making it very hard to think of planting anything. It has been complete depletion mode, a forced fallow time and forced fallowness is uncomfortable.

What happens when the paradigm shifts and you are required to so some soul searching? What are the good questions? One of the most challenging ones is “What do you long for?”. It’s difficult to stick with the gardening metaphor here because I’m not sure how to directly apply it. Unless you consider that when someone else is the one managing your resources it is easy to stop paying attention to what it is you, yourself, need to grow well.  When you spend a lot of time letting someone else, perceived expectations, societal requirements, politicians assert “this is what ‘we’ do” thinking and prescribe how you go about growing fruit I believe you kind of forget how to ‘long for’, replacing God granted desires with  a checklist written by someone else. How awkward (and damned uncomfortable) to realize you are pretty sure you’ve been growing someone else’s idea of a harvest and not what God intended you to grow for far too long. When the time comes to kick the farmers off your plot, you have to figure out what you are best suited to plant!

I am an artist. I am also a poet. I don’t profess to be amazing at either, and they have always been secondary to all the things that were considered important, kingdom oriented, and above all, profitable. Slowly, as in it has taken me years(decades if I’m honest), I am understanding the absolute denial of self I was participating in by not nourishing my own field, or garden, in the way I needed to. The fruit was weak. Perpetually weak. I am also a mom of three adults and their spouses, a grandmother (Mim) to seven amazing individuals that will never be considered weak fruit-these are crops I have tended with deep attention and faithfulness. Though sometimes that attention was a practice in procrastination as well-if I was busy enough with all of them, I didn’t have time to waste thinking about myself. Could I have been denying self so much I had kicked it out of the equation all together? I recognize now I’ve taken my longings and re-formed them into something more appropriate which has become, ultimately, a denial of who I was created to be as a whole person, willing to accept only part of who I am and therefore not allowing God, or myself, the gift of my wholeness.

Deconstruction, political climate, relational stress, financial concerns-the detritus in my garden is significant and I barely muster the energy or heart to do much more than the minimum to keep it going. Accepting a fallow season for what it is-my soulless soil needing to lay low is a step into understanding. It is necessary to ask the hard questions, working them deep into the places they need to reach, picking out the old bones and broken glass along the way; pruning away what no longer grows to make room for light and nutrients. Cutting out dead rose canes this morning and cutting my ankle on a particularly thorny stem, I recognized it hurt. Cutting out what you no longer need hurts, and that pain is needed to acknowledge it once meant something. My heel bled, my heart has bled, but the beauty is it now there is the opportunity to heal. I am pretty sure I have exhausted the whole gardening thing but let me continue…

Photo by and machines on Unsplash

I relearned something recently and like a worry stone in a pocket I continue carrying it around, rubbing it between mental fingers as a sort of soundless poem. Imaginal cells (thank you Chuck DeGroat). Think the transformation of caterpillar to slurry to butterfly. This nearly formless, invisible, magical stuff of life that wrestles dissolution into magnificent change, into something glorious, has become a pinprick of God-light I am able cling to. I continue to rub this stone as it gains substance, and presence, and even strength. This spark rests in the dark empty space, this fallow, but not barren, field that remains after undoing so many long-held beliefs, and grants permission to simply hold that God-light as a form of hope.

Imaginal cells contain all the material, all the information needed to bring about a new creation. The understanding is if I tend the small imaginal cell, turn to it for comfort, encouragement, wisdom; as long as I nurture this cell, feed it good food, let it see the light, bask in the sun, take in the rain, weed out what inhibits growth, prune what does grow, I know it will do the hard work of synthesizing all the information-the formation-to bring about the new thing to come, the better harvest, one grown in nutrient rich soil—the kind that brings about all the beautiful things like sugar pumpkins, potatoes, radishes, sweet peas, and a zinnia or two for good measure.

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A poem to share, one written sometime in the last four years-I believe it fits…

It Was Time, and it Was

A violence, necessary,
A salvation of sorts
When I take the sharpened blade,
Excising root, after root
Blackened with rot,
Reeking of decay.

Severing all but a few 
plump green shoots
Snaking out from the body—
Mindful not to damage the eyes,
The precious eyes, so this once beautiful thing,
May see what comes next.

When I upend its arca praetoria, 
Packed tightly with musty
Soil, fouled by too much of a good thing,
And not enough of what was needed,
It crumbles in fits
And starts, then altogether in a fetid
Heap, there in the basin, layed bare, 
the emptied bits and pieces, once rich,
Now rotted, an embarrassment of neglect to be borne away, 
--returned to ground, banished.

There is a great care needed, 
To wash,
To prepare, 
Both vessel and stem,
To nurture and repair,
                  --Find the right soil,
To wait.

Will the eyes remain healthy?
Roots regrow?
Nodes flesh out with promise?
With so much lost,
In the losing,
Will life be found?

This has gotten lengthy but I want to share one more thing-

Yesterday my grandkids came home from a play rehearsal for this years offering, The Hobbit. Beach House is a yearly, marvelous neighborhood production that gives the kids full autonomy on production, direction, and fun and we have seen Alice in Wonderland, The Sword in the Stone, and others. They were humming and singing an old song I immediately recognized and decided it was pretty apt for this post, as well as The Hobbit. Never underestimate the sophistication and directness of a group of creative kids!!

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