Amending the Soil

I am a fantastically bad gardener. A series of mistakes made this clear. To my wife's credit, she has never gloated in each predicted disaster. She told me the garden I was planning in our backyard was too ambitious, beyond my reach. She politely suggested I don't have the patience of a gardener. She also said she would not be available to serve as a garden assistant, had her own gardens.

In the confidence of delusion I cast these warnings aside. Essentially I said, gardening is not complicated. Turn up the soil, plant the seeds, water if necessary. How can this be complicated? My only real concern was too much success. What would I do with too many vegetables?

I built three raised beds which were about 150 square feet altogether. Purchased a load of topsoil. Next an array of seeds was selected.  Peppers, tomatoes, beans, herbs, cucumbers.  Flower seeds too as I wanted the beds to be esthetically appealing.

              Shortly after I sowed the seeds, the spring rains persisted for the better part of two weeks.  Believing it would take a good month before the seeds would germinate and need attention and as there was no need to water my garden with so much rain, I didn't really think to check.  Okay.  I got distracted.  When I did venture out to the backyard, I was stunned.  The three beds were completely covered in growth.  A lush carpet of green.  Which is great.  My garden was growing.  The problem was it was unclear what was vegetable seedling and what was weeds. 

              Kathy didn't gloat, but neither did she offer to help.  She said, "good luck."  My failure was not yet clear to me.  But as the spring led to summer my lack of farming skills became quite evident.  I was shocked how weeds once pulled seem to resurrect.  They just kept returning.  My bumper crop was weeds.

               A slow learner, I started again next spring.  This time I didn't use as many seeds and was sure to mark where I sowed them.  Something I didn't do the first time.  This second pass at the garden taught me why dill is considered a weed and mint is the most invasive plant of all time.  Drank a lot of mint tea that summer as I had enough for a small village.

              Yet the last failure took time.  Year after year, I persisted in my wildly oversized garden of many weeds, and year after year, my crops got smaller and smaller.  The pepper plants that were once near factor-level producers kept getting smaller and the peppers fewer.  As I pondered my lack of success, Kathy asked me a strange question.  Have you amended the soil?    This seemed strange, amending soil?  I was very skilled at amending motions as directed by Robert's Rules of Order.  But soil?  How does one amend soil? 

              Amending the soil with fertilizer I was amazed at the result.  Who would have thought?  It was then it became absolutely clear: I am a fantastically bad gardener.  Now I keep a small patch of herbs and peppers.  Sage, oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary with some jalapenos and shishitos.  It is a modest little plot.  For the most part Kathy weeds and waters this for me.  As even in modesty I am rather incompetent.

              Knowing the challenge of gardening has always made our lesson today confusing.  I know parables are not meant to be treated with strict literalism, but the gardener sowing seeds is not very good, not a great farmer.  Even in my quite apparent lack of skill, I know you don't cast seeds willy nilly.  What kind of farmer casts seed on the road?  Weeds, rocks, these should have been addressed before planting. 

              A parable is meant to make us pause and I always pause here and think, if the sower is God, maybe the creator of the universe is not skillful in the manual method of gardening.  Surely God can create a garden of Eden, but maybe the actual labor of planting, sowing, and weeding, maybe this was outsourced. 

              The parable of the sower never made a lot of sense to me given the rather implausible lack of skill in sowing.  Not every seed is going to make it, sure, but one of out of four seems bad.  Also of bother is the rather obvious meaning.  Not hard to figure out what is good here.  You want to be the good soil.  Okay.  Not much of a mystery.  Nobody wants a life without success or short-lived success or dashed dreams. Seems too simple.

              The explanation of the parable seems off too, seems judgmental. I have heard many sermons where the preacher castigated people as shallow or atheists as hard hearted and hard-working people trying to make a life as being choked by worldly concerns. Good soil Christians like us are true believers who read their bible or attend church and bible study and other markers of devotion.  The good soil person prays and shares their faith. The parable seems to contradict the graciousness Jesus calls us to offer one other. 

              I always struggled with this parable until I saw it as four parables.  The kingdom of God is like seeds on the road; the kingdom of God is like seeds in rocky soil; the kingdom of God is like seeds growing up in the weeds; and the kingdom of God is like seeds planted in good soil.  Once I saw this as four parables and as about each of us, each heart, only then did it start to make sense. 

              There are times when I am not prepared to listen.  People tried to help me see something (you should not start with 150 square feet of garden space), sometimes when people speak the truth to me, I am zero.  The words don't reach the heart and take hold.

              Sometimes I am consumed with worry, held by fear, especially when it comes to disappointing people, or my kids and their kids.  I can lose sleep.  Even though I know dread doesn't make anything better, fear can make me deaf to hope.

              Who among us is not pulled in too many directions, unable to focus, to do what is truly important and not waste energy on what is not?  The voice in us that says, let this go, or remember what is important, this voice can be drowned out by a chorus of distractions, excuses. 

              And there are parts of me where I am growing, good soil.  There is within me places of freedom and faith that are doing quite well.  Gifts and skills, growing edges, new growth: you have these as well.  We all do.

              Yet it was the Buddhist take on this truth, this parable, where I began see the seeds and soil in a profound light.  I love how Tich Nhat Hanh saw this teaching.  For him, there are all types of soil in us, different degrees of health.  But then he suggests all of these can become good soil.  You can plow up what is hard; you can remove the rocks; you can pull the weeds.  The Buddhist view of this parable is change.  You can change for the better.

              I was surprised this summer by yet another part of this parable.  Something I have never seen before.  Gathered with dear friends, Ric and Carmen, a couple we have known since high school, as we sat and caught up this August and swopped stories of kids and careers and family, with them I realized something about the good soil.  It is good soil you want, true and the not yet good soil can be changed, true.  But what I heard as we laughed and remembered was sometimes good soil needs to be amended to stay good.

              How I came to this view was the memories of how we met.  Our friend Carmen worked with me in a candy story when we were in high school and college.  Sitting together we were seventeen again.  Carmen and I closed the candy store together every Saturday night for more than two years.  And the memory which was so vivid was how at 900 I would lower the grill, fence at the front of the store and from the back on cue I would hear the piano, the guitars wail, the drumbeat of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.  The Boss would fill the space.  As the grill came down the music went way up and we would croon and dance for the next hour as we cleaned and mopped, whipped and washed down the little store. It was probably the most fun I have ever had at work.

              Carman was one of those Springsteen fans who knew him before he was famous, knew all the lyrics to Thunder Road and how Darkness on the Edge of Town and Greetings from Asbury Park were places of true devotion.

              Every Saturday night we asked the heartbreaking question: Is a dream a lie that doesn't come true or is it something worse?  Week after week we sang "little girl I want to marry you.  I'd be proud if you would wear my name."  Mostly what I remember from those evenings, though, is how right the music sounded.  It was our coming-of-age soundtrack.  When the Boss sang of Independence Day, the day you have to leave home, we knew it was coming fast.  The lyrics felt prophetic.

              As older versions of those teens we sat and walked through the decades of marriage and raising children, family gained and family lost, as we did, I also remembered talking with Carman about our confusion.  In 1987 Springsteen put out an album that was different.  The Tunnel of Love.  He was not shouting and fighting, he wasn't heading to Cadillac Ranch or confessing a hungry heart.  He wrote songs about the complexity of marriage; he seemed no longer born to run as he was walking with fear and a fate he didn't seem able to escape.  He sang about betrayal and not knowing things for sure.

              Then on top of this the Boss said in an interview about these new songs, how they came from a moment of insight.  He said he could now see how he didn't really know what love was all about.  This was very confusing.  Given how much we saw him as the sound of our heart, given how much we found true in his lyrics about love, how could he not know what love was?  I remember being dumbfounded.

              This confusion persisted for quite some time.  It was decades before we could see what these new lyrics meant.  It would take the span of a long marriage to see how our definitions of life, how we love and are loved, how this good soil in us gets depleted, loses vitality.

              Sitting together, much older, and a bit wiser, I could see how those early anthems where you are river that don't know where its flowin’ or the river that is an adolescent dream, how it runs dry, I could see these songs were good soil for a time.  Nothing wrong with them.  But like the heart, they would need to be amended with definitions of love you just can't see when you're twenty.

              We are all honest enough to say there is hard soil in us; we are ever prone to worries or to a lack of devotion.  This is part of the struggle of life.  Change is always possible.  Yet, what brings me such great hope is the possibility that the good soil in us, the love and faith and hope, the trust of compassion and kindness, these parts of our heart, while they do wear out and wear a bit thin, they can be amended.  We can find new ways of living with courage beyond what we could have ever imagined. Good in us can be reborn.  Amended.  Amen.