~reclaiming one's garden (and thoughts on grief)~

For the past two days, I've been immersed in my garden.  It's been therapeutic - I realized Friday evening in a conversation with a friend that I wasn't the best of company (for them, and in reality, even for myself) - and so I retreated into the shady green spaces of my garden to work through emotions that I'm not sure that I even, tonight, understand.

Grief is a strange egg.  It floats, it crashes, it ebbs, it sneaks up on you - it makes you feel unsettled, unsure, insecure, and angry.  Three weeks ago tonight was the last time that I spoke with my Mother - at least in a conversation where she spoke to me as well.  As I moved throughout my garden this weekend, I encountered half-finished projects that mirrored my Mother's ups and downs over the past year:  I had started trimming the lower branches (many of which were dead) from the bald cypresses in the fall, right when we learned that my Mother's lung tumor had grown and so she was going on a new targeted therapy, Tarceva.  I started cleaning out the bed in the front, by the gate, right before I learned that the primary tumor had metastasized into numerous locations.  This weekend my garden felt like a living chronology of my Mother's illness, as I slowly worked on each unfinished project - while remembering the past year in painful detail.  My garden looks better tonight, but I am exhausted.

~~~~~

I've written of Li-Young Lee before.

This weekend, quite unintentionally, I ran across a wonderful reading he gave at UC Berkeley (found here - I recommend the webcast).  He spoke of his Father telling him when he was a young boy to say 'goodbye' each time he inhaled, and 'thank you' each time he exhaled - and he said that 'as we die, the meaning of our lives get unfolded'...and how communicating, almost any form of communication - especially the spoken form, requires the dying breath.  Oh, he spoke more eloquently than I am writing tonight - but if you find yourself feeling a bit as I do, then I believe that you will find yourself engaged in what he has to say.   

But for someone who speaks and writes so much of death - he also writes wonderfully about what it means to be alive.

From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

      

~~~~~

I cut the chinese wisteria off at the base this afternoon.  It's vines - reaching up the stairway to the side deck and even across the deck rail at the top for 10 feet or more - by tomorrow will all be wilted - slowly turning brown in our warm May sun. 

I have enjoyed this vine for years, but honestly can't manage it.  It's also necessary to take down before the demolition of my current home.  It was time.

~~~~~

Goodbye and thank-you.

Lee's words - those of his Father - have haunted me this weekend.  I am writing the thank-you notes on behalf of our family, and I feel that with each one that I write, than I am saying a small goodbye to my Mother, and a thank you to both her and our friends and family.  I've only written twenty of them - and I have many more to go.  I work in the garden, and then stop for awhile and write a thank-you note.  This has been the rhythm of my weekend.

~~~~~

It is time to walk the Wild Dog.   

Comments

[Christopher C NC]

Maybe grief is like a really big cleanup job in the garden. At first it seems to big to tackle, finally you get moving and make the first cut, then the next, and on and on, until it is done. The garden remains; cleansed, and things look much more positive.

[Pam]

Christopher C, that is what I am hoping for. Thank you.

[Taylor]

Sad about the wisteria...I went to a elementary school that was in an old house and the entire back yards and woods were filled with wisteria. They were at least 100 year old vines that were so strong 8 little girls could sit and play on them with nary a give or a crack. And when they bloomed! Oh heavens, I think the smell of wisteria on a summer night is one of my favorite and most missed things in the world.

But invasive it certainly is. I can understand exactly why you did it. The idea of having some in a pot is a good one, though.

And I was so excited to see a wide shot of your garden. I've been musing about garden design a lot lately, and I think of yours often.

[kate]

The poem by Li-Young Lee really does take one's breath away...

Am reading parts of an interesting book, 'Healing through the dark emotions: the wisdom of grief, fear and despair', Miriam Greenspan. Some food for thought.

I've always had this incredible desire to grow Wisteria - when I finally made peace with the fact that I would never grow it, I stenciled wisteria vines on my garage wall.