Do Something
Walking back from town today, Henlee and I stopped by our little raised bed of herbs, poor neglected little plot. There reside two round lavenders, a short and fluffy rosemary, and two straggly mints. I notice that they are all fairly healthy and of good heart despite the fact that I only tend to them once a moon or so; I am impressed and admonished, both.
After redirecting Hen’s trowel enthusiasm, we relished their scents and feel. Lavender can be velvety, did you know?
My favorite part, though, was watching Henlee’s dance with the life before her. She had this amazing little exchange with each of the herbs. Gently, almost like a hug, she drew her arms and hands back around and off the bushier plants, rubbed her hands together and rolled them out from herself and then back again, making little circles in front of her chest– not unlike the women who welcome Shabbat. Breathing in and out, in and out, she’d do it again with the next herb and the next.
I was entranced, but I was also just past the brink of hangry. Lest you think we are all bubbles and sunshine over here, I will tell you that I had to pick my daughter up like a barrel and carry her back into the house under my arm, screaming and kicking.
I managed to grab just a handful of rosemary on our way and smashed it into a jar with some salt. There, I thought, I have Done Something with our bounty, like the liberal arts graduate that I am answering for my degree.
Once we had all calmed down and had some curry for lunch, my mind returned to that salty moment.
There was more to Doing Something with our garden than just checking off a list. Again, like the liberal arts education, there is so much more there. There is formation, depth, relationship, identity.
I had Done Something with the rosemary and it had Done Something with me.
That snatch of rosemary silently infusing a jar of coarse kosher salt was infusing me with a knowledge of itself and its kin in the garden.
We are here, God’s beloved. We are here. And what a wonder it is to be alive.
Perhaps the rosemary shares properties with another leafy cousin to make me hear things like that, but it made its point, its invitation.
We are here and you are here and it is a wonder to be here in this tiny little garden on earth.
What a marvelous mundanity.
I am reading Kathleen Norris’s Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work. In it she talks about the dailiness of life. The fact that every day we rise to ritual mundanity, to the day-in-day-out rhythms of home.
Cook, eat, wash up. Wear, wash, hang up. Nourish, marvel, bathe, rest.
We are creatures who desperately need this homey rhythm, space we can inhabit by rote. For therein our brains have room for wonder and worship. It’s a paradox and a marvel. We need the physical patterns of behavior we know by heart to let our spirits soar.
“The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry,” she says.
But the gift of this essential and traditionally “domestic” liveliness of life is so often missed. We are taught by society to move past these so-called drudgeries. Hire it out. Not worthy of your highly educated and very important energy.
Or, if we long for such simplicity, we think that we must wait for a more ideal moment. When society doesn’t expect us to dress a certain way, we will shop second-hand. When we move to our new home, we’ll garden. When we get settled or retired or the children graduated or –
Anytime but now.
It’s just a little neglected raised bed after all, no need to bother. What will it really amount to in the end, anyway?
“We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were,” Norris responds, “We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places – out of Galilee, as it were…”
Even a scrappy little raised bed, it seems.
According to Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide, rosmarinus officinalis is a “legendary brain tonic.” It has properties long thought to help stir our minds and rouse the memory.
Indeed. Rosmarinus officinalis stirred me to wrestle with Norris’s words, but, even better, it re-membered me again to my humanness, to my home. It invited me again into this time and this space.
And to Do Something with it.
I went out to the garden again between getting Henlee settled with Aaron for their naptime ritual and preparing for my afternoon meetings. I gathered 6 tablespoons of lavender directly into the French Press. Following instructions from Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs, I poured about a quart of boiling water over the leafy bits and let it all sit for almost an hour. That strong strained infusion waits to be a lavender lemonade in just a few minutes, an elixir for calm rootedness in such a time as this.
There is enough, beloveds. And anything is possible.