i’ve had a lot of down-time lately. Although my leave from BaseCamp started on April 6, the planting season has been continually delayed due to cold weather (most recently, until May 1). i’ve been out to camp for a couple days to clean up and set up, but now i’m back in Kelowna with Rease & Tanya and facing a few more days of free time, trying not to worry about how bills are going to get paid.

Tanya and i spent the afternoon churning up soil and digging in compost for a new garden. It was pretty much heaven.

We started tearing out the overgrown grass last weekend from a pre-existing garden bed. Today we grabbed Rease’s old beater truck, drove out to the dump, and got a yard of compost - where we were helped by a backhoe driver who watched us incredulously as we took off the canopy and replaced it when the truck box was full of the compost. Apparently, we were the ’strongest women [he'd] seen in a very long time’ [and Tanya weighs *maybe* 100lbs, soaking wet]. Yaaaahhh….it doesn’t take a lot of strength, just a mindset that doesn’t tell you “oooh, maybe i’ll break a nail…” But i digress.

i’ve been dreaming about gardens lately. Spaces of land, plotted out into vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruit… ground that yields up a meal, or fare for a market or cafe….maybe my own cafe. A cafe where all the produce is grown within sight of the tables….maybe where interns and/or teens spend time creating food out of the days’ harvest….where people can re-learn an ancient art of putting seeds in the ground, tending to them, and enjoying the result of a kind of labor that leaves your hands dirty and your heart happily full of the knowledge of being visibly productive.

I’ve been dreaming about gardens perhaps because they seem to encapsulate my ideas about living well…they require research, planning, intention, preparation, hard work, more hard work, faith, watchfulness, patience, flexibility, more hard work, and finally, the ability to sit back, be thankful, and thoroughly reap and enjoy the rewards of a job well done. Gardens demand cycles of action/reaction. You sow, you reap. Control is yours for a moment while you weed…but taken back forcefully by a random frost or hailstorm. Work is necessary during the day, and necessarily stopped at night.

So much chaos that we create for ourselves in the modern world is forcefully righted by the diligence of caring for a piece of land; laziness is not tolerated, but then a garden in January doesn’t really support the continuation of workaholic 60-hour weeks of labor, either. Dirt and beauty are coexistant, not opposing. Cooperation benefits gardening tasks exponentially, and creativity is inherent in the tasks of conditioning soil, rotating crops, dividing labor, dealing with sunlight and shade and aberrant weather patterns and all the other random things that happen when coming into direct contact with the earth. And, i believe that God is evident in the unlikely intuition and persistence of new seedlings and grasping vines, metamorphizing blossoms and decaying roots. From pea plants in plastic cups to full blown orchards, accepting the mystery of growing things is inherently educational and therapeutic to a cluttered mind and a life filled with insignificant activities. To watch the re-creation of life - to really watch it, observing both the simplicity and complexity, wondering why the sprout goes up and the roots go down - there is something about this that whispers fiercely of what is good, what is healthy, what is right and true and worth working for. i mean, a garden is where life was first created, and the last place anything was flawless…surely we can learn something from this!

i’ve been dreaming about gardens, and contemplating how this dream corresponds to the work i do with kids. Over the last eight months, i’ve had a lot of mixed experiences at the addictions treatment program that i’m working with, and while i’m not willing to pull a full-stop on working with youth, i have been facing a lot of frustration with this job that i claim to love, namely because it is difficult to see the effectiveness of what i do. When kids come into the program and stay for 3 months, a lot of changes are often made….and a lot of relapsing also occurs. i vacillate between hopefulness and cynicism that when the kids graduate from the program, they will stay clean and make healthy decisions in their lives. i wish that i could grow to care for these kids deeply instead of shrugging it off when they blow out of the program, but three months is a blunted opportunity for relationship. Digging in the garden, i’m reminded of how much and how little happens in three months….sometimes activity is frenetic, intense, and rewarding, and sometimes the only necessary activity is waiting for the spring thaw.

Though i’m happy enough with where i’m at now, working temporarily in a friend’s garden poignantly reminds me to think of where i want to be in a few years time…and pouring myself into short-term personal investments is not where i want to be. Perhaps it’s just a stage of life thing. Maybe it’s the ol’ biological clock ticking, or could it be that interest, passions, skill sets, and other life factors are simply lining up in a way that tell me to go out, get a piece of land, find people to work with,  invest in growing things over an extended period of time, and live life well? Right now, i’m thinking that it’s probably a bit of all three, and i’m okay with that.

In the meantime, i’m going to go get some seeds…

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