A Prayer For Spring Planting

My last broccoli crown of 2024, harvested on Thanksgiving Day. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

Today’s essay is part of a new series including me,

Latham Turner

,

Bowen Dwelle

,

Michael Mohr

,

Dee Rambeau

, and

Lyle McKeany

. In the past, we’ve explored our personal philosophies, fatherhood, and work, among others. This week our theme is ordinary things.

A Prayer For Spring Planting

It is Thursday, March 20, the beginning of the spring equinox, when the sun passes directly overhead along the equator and sunlight is spread equally between the northern and southern hemispheres. This is also the time when I begin starting seeds indoors and turning my garden beds in anticipation of the last frost. Daffodils form the first patches of green in the yard, the early crocuses open their purple petals, and tulip bulbs shoot their thick stalks up from the frozen ground.

The celestial alignment of the equinox ought to bring a feeling of balance, the way my gardening has served, for fifteen years, as a spiritual ballast for me. I planted my first garden the year I decided to embrace Iowa as my home. I met my ex soon after and the garden remained a cornerstone of what I brought to our family life. I have also leaned heavily on food traditions while rebuilding my life after divorce. But this year, with the world turned on its head, I have returned to those familiar rituals with a sense of unease, a feeling that the structures of meaning I’ve relied upon for most of my adult life are insufficient, that more is required of me to build a durable future for myself and my children, that I need to examine everything, even the most ordinary things, with fresh eyes and an open heart.

Last August I wrote about turning away from my news feed toward my Cornelian Cherry Dogwood, which I’d mistakenly identified as a Witch Hazel. I needed a break from the fearful headlines and doomsday predictions, and it was steadying to feel those cherries between my fingers, to hear their soft thunder in my steel bowls. Harvest is a time for giving thanks, and I did so abundantly then and all through the winter as I’ve enjoyed the tart jelly that my cherry tree gave to me.

I still believe that turning to small beautiful things, nurturing what is close at hand, produces better fruit in my life than ruminating about events beyond my control. Before my divorce I even compared gardening to religion. By that I meant a synthesis of paganism and rationalism — not literal earth worship, but a feeling that the science of seeds and soil wasn’t complete without soulfulness, without participating in the honorable harvest. Gardening was more than a hobby, it was a ceremony that brought me closer to the place where I lived and often to people, when I had abundance to share. But for more years than I’d like to admit, that ceremony has also meant escape.

My cherries only gave me solace last year because I believed that my country would remain intact regardless of the election outcome, that the center would hold, that our national roots could withstand a tempest or two above ground. But I can no longer claim that Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale go too far in their dystopic predictions. I can no longer deny that the grim realities they imagine are possible in the United States — even consistent with what some Americans are already experiencing. It is not possible for me to turn my face away from the carnage in Gaza, withdraw to my basement, and begin soaking seeds for planting.

Make no mistake: I am not abandoning the garden. I just can’t disappear into it the way I once did. How can I tell you about the Red Mushroom variety I’m excited to grow this year, a high-octane variation on the Scotch Bonnet, or rhapsodize about the fermented hot sauce I’ll make and share with only my closest friends, without thinking about what it means “To Be A Gazan During Ramadan,” breaking a fast with “fistfuls of grass,” staying true to a faith practice when all has been turned to rubble? I’ve tried to build a sanctuary in my home, a safe place to write and grow my coaching business, but it’s increasingly hard to imagine anyone as safe or any refuge as impenetrable. If I were suffering anything approaching the pain in Gaza, I’d have broken long ago. Rationalism, the liberal arts, literary craft — there is wisdom in each of these, but they are not enough anymore.

If you have followed this series for any period of time it will shock you to hear it, but I’m beginning to wonder how big a leap it would be to embrace faith not as a metaphor for gardening, but as the underlying principle for planting and harvest and giving thanks. What might it mean for me, personally, to see my seeds and the fruits they produce as gifts from a Creator? What fruits might this kind of gardening produce in me, compared to the ceremony of escape I’ve observed every other year, when I’ve sought sanctuary in a little temple that I tell myself I alone have made, but that now seems like little more than a house of straw? How might this change of heart extend beyond the garden into my practice of fatherhood, my vision for writing, and a more durable structure of meaning for the years ahead?

Red Mushroom pepper. From Territorial Seeds.

A reader of this series once described me as the most spiritual atheist he’d ever met. I’ve always explained away any appearance of spirituality as a vestige of my Pentecostal upbringing, when I listened to long sermons and internalized their lyrical rhythms. You can hear it in my sentences, the way I fall into patterns of twos and threes, how I keep stringing a thought along, adding one subordinate clause and then another, riffing and returning to the refrain, finding the root chord only when the attempt feels complete. Through the many years I’ve claimed other labels like rationalist or humanist, I’ve recognized that writing is for me what prayer is for many others.

If I cannot write without adopting a prayerful attitude, why is it so difficult to say that I have been, all these years, actually praying through my essays? The core “why” of writing for me is building a bridge between myself and others, ideally between myself and strangers who would never otherwise imagine a kinship with me. Such kinship lies at the root of many religions, which simply go one layer deeper to explain those echoes between human beings (in the form of love or charity or intellectual truth seeking) as glimpses of the divine, that what we share with each other exists without limit or flaw in a Creator.

To write is to embrace mystery, to surrender to epiphany as a visitation that cannot be forced, but only approached humbly by preparing the mind and the heart to receive. Similarly, despite the illusion of control that gardening brings, to plant a seed is to pray. There are ways to optimize the conditions for sprouting, but no way to control germination itself. The gardener is nothing without the seeds, which have their own ancient histories that predate human hands. And who made the seed? Not the company that sold it to me, no matter how many generations of breeding they might have overseen. Not even the plant itself, which did not exist before the seed from which it sprang.

The origin remains a mystery. Embracing a Creator does not remove that mystery, it merely provides a different structure of meaning for every other link in the gardening chain. It explains what/who I as a gardener am surrendering to, what/who I as the gardener can thank at the end of the year, just what kind of humility I bring to my warming mat and seed trays in the basement where my cats prowl watchfully.

I’ve been thinking about surrender this year, how it might improve my gardening and also my life beyond the vegetable rows. In fact, many of my horticultural failures are examples of arrogance, not humility. This is my third year gardening in Pennsylvania, and I’ve learned the hard way that when the locals say to wait until Memorial Day to set out bedding plants, they mean what they say. I have lost plants to late frosts every year in Pennsylvania because I’ve rolled the dice, hoping to beat the odds. For what? So I could enjoy bragging rights among my gardening friends, the first ripe tomatoes, a few more fistfuls of cucumbers before the vines wither and die.

I don’t recall ever losing plants in Iowa if the overnight temperatures stayed above freezing, but there is something about this Appalachian climate, a different humidity, that brings heaviness to the air. I’ve seen frost in the garden when the thermometer never even approached freezing. This is possible because cold air sinks, and the temperature at the ground level, where I leave my seedlings exposed, is often colder in springtime than it is even at my full height. Just a degree of difference can mean life or death for a fledgling pepper plant.

I have taken this lesson to heart and am starting my peppers two weeks later than last year. I’ve circled Memorial Day on the calendar as the day for planting, and not one day sooner. The locals didn’t invent this principle: they’ve simply come to accept it as a fact of the place. There is a softness in extending that thought a step further, acknowledging the Creator who made the place, who determined its rhythms, and who might be understood in part through deeper familiarity with its cycles and seasons.

It is possible to draw other conclusions, as I have for most of my adult life. The earth could be seen as its own creator, seeds as tiny symbols of chance, and beauty as more of a metaphor than an abiding truth. I could keep trying to impose my will on my Appalachian home, studying its logic and integrity only to maximize my control over it, cursing the groundhogs and squirrels that lay waste to my perfect plans. This view is a variation on Michael Pollan’s thesis for The Botany of Desire: that once plants became aware of their power over humans, they evolved to satisfy human desires so well that gardeners like me would keep planting their seeds. Pollan speculates that humans came to see flowering plants as beautiful because blossoms were harbingers of edible fruit for hunter-gatherer societies, as the yellow blossoms on my Cornelian Dogwood are now to me.

Cornelian Cherry Blossom. From The Morton Arboretum.

But it is also possible to recognize that flowers are innately beautiful and that humans have an inborn appetite for beauty that reaches far beyond food. It no longer feels like a logical stretch to say that my garden participates in a larger design, that the restorative energy I feel coming out of the ground in the smell of freshly turned loam and in sun-warmed tomatoes that explode in my mouth, draws from more than a purely physical source.

Aldo Leopold never directly credits a Creator in A Sand County Almanac, but his language in the following sketch is reverential — a lyrical contrast to Pollan’s scientific voice and a useful illustration of the shift in my own mind and heart.

…[W]hen I see the silt ribbon turning green with Eleocharis, I watch closely thereafter, for this is the sign that the river is in a painting mood. Almost overnight the Eleocharis becomes a thick turf, so lush and so dense that the meadow mice from the adjoining upland cannot resist the temptation. They move en masse to the green pasture, and apparently spend the nights rubbing their ribs in its velvety depths. A maze of neatly tended mouse-trails bespeaks their enthusiasm. The deer walk up and down in it, apparently just for the pleasure of feeling it underfoot. Even a stay-at-home mole has tunneled his way across the dry bar to the Eleocharis ribbon, where he can heave and hump the verdant sod to his heart’s content.

At this stage the seedlings of plants too numerous to count and too young to recognize spring to life from the damp warm sand under the green ribbon.

To view the painting, give the river three more weeks of solitude, and then visit the bar on some bright morning just after the sun has melted the daybreak fog. The artist has now laid his colors, and sprayed them with dew. The Eleocharis sod, greener than ever, is now spangled with blue mimulus, pink dragon-head, and the milk-white blooms of Sagittaria. Here and there a cardinal flower thrusts a red spear skyward. At the head of the bar, purple ironweeds and pale pink joy-pyes stand tall against the wall of willows. And if you have come quietly and humbly, as you should to any spot that can be beautiful only once, you may surprise a fox-red deer, standing knee-high in the garden of his delight.

I’ll need a few more essays to explain why I’m opening myself to belief, why that shift in mind and heart is not another escape (as I recognize it could be), and how my thinking fits into a larger conversation for our time. But after mulling these questions for the past two months, I can say there’s no doubt which makes my garden taste sweeter: rationalism with a little space for pagan leanings or an openness to my garden as part of creation, my efforts as echoes of a larger design, to which I surrender humbly and gratefully.

It is time to dispense with the hypothetical “if” and “then.” Let me no longer say “How will my gardening change if I acknowledge a Creator?” I wouldn’t be writing this essay if my heart had not already changed fundamentally, if I did not feel certain that I have believed in a Creator all along, that the fruits of belief are greater than imagining myself, my body, or the soil beneath my feet as the beginning and end of all things.

Is this a necessary shift in thinking? It may not be for everyone. But it is necessary for me.

Read more essays about faith and doubt ⬇️

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Read the Ordinary Things Series ⬇️

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