When You Water a Garden

Sometimes I need the pause that comes from having to water the garden. We have no fancy drip system or sprinklers since we’re just renting. Soon we’ll move and dig up these plants and take them with us. Maybe in our new home we’ll have a more efficient way of keeping them alive but for today I’m slave to the long snaking hose, hot from the sun.

My mom usually waters. But she’s on vacation and has entrusted me to keep her plants alive. We’re co-owners of this garden. But she’s the boss, the one who makes things bloom, who knows about soil types and latin names and how to make the dirt black as midnight and so rich it gobbles up roots and springs out plants like magic. This is her sanctuary, her haven. I am always more of a visitor here than a resident. She’s teaching me and I’m learning but the potted plant in the bathroom is despondent at the loss of her these past weeks.

Still I am taking over her duties and it could not have come at a worse time. I am knee-deep in cardboard boxes and lists of things to shut off and turn on at our new place. Things to forward and spaces to make and things to dump and sort and haul off. I am a to do list that never seems to get smaller. I am too busy to stand in the grass and hold a hose every single day.

But I do because she told me if she comes back and I’ve killed her garden she will kill me dead. She’s not even 5 feet tall, a small Asian woman who wouldn’t hurt a thing but I have no doubt she’d make good on her threats, she loves this garden so.

So I pad out to the grass and crank the faucet on each day.

I am a mechanism of rest, forced to slow once again when I’d rather cross things from my to do list. This watering is a sabbath to my day. Not work as much as surrender.

I can do no productive thing other than hold the hose and aim at the roots in my life. It takes forever to get it right, to get the water into the soil and not just spray the leaves with abandon. Our hose leaks down the side of my hand and soon I am drenched.

I am given to pray when I water. Maybe even more than when I plant.

I am bound back to earth and the tread of soiled paths weaving through bud and stem and the bloom of life and color. It gives me pause to breathe and remember to see all over again and again. There are raspberries weighty with their future as jam or the delight of a child’s tongue.

 

There are potatoes we didn’t plant this year but took root from last years harvest and the splash of the hose reveals the flashes of red and brown flesh. Sometimes things remain and continue to grow and I’m surprised that this has taken no work or planting but only the cultivation of past soil. Some potatoes that never made it up from the ground, harvest we never saw then, prepared this reaping a year later.

Sometimes I need the pause. When the phone calls haven’t been returned and the emails wait another day and I pray in the garden. And I learn to see all over again. Again and again.

Sometimes to be productive, we need to stop trying so hard to produce. We need to let the soil rest and soak up and soften. We need to remember it takes awhile to make anything grow and much of it is left to faith and trust that what’s planted and tended will make its way in good time.

 

Give me pause, Jesus. Let me see. 

God is faithful and plentiful and always enough.