Backyard Meditation
Crossroads of Ritual and Chore, an Informal Musing
Blessed Sunday!
Welcome back to the Chapel of Honey. We meet you as you are, where you are, no judgement. This lil letter from the heart was originally started as a timeline note, but why pour into the feed any more like that? Makes me think of a trough we all run to. Planting my words and tending them with care instead.
Lately I've been soaking up the sacred crossroads that is the intersection of ritual and chore, especially in the spaces of home and garden. I've always considered the home a temple, a sacred body that has its own spirit and supports many more. The house as a mother, the classroom as the invisible extra teacher, the room we are in as a container and director and muse. Watering the garden is a special tending. Related to caring for the family, caring for the animals in our homes and yet its own experience and body of work. I brush the cat and sweep the floors and put away dishes and fold the laundry, and while it all lives the meditation offered is about the repetition in care, the beauty that is on the other side of the cleaning, the favorite spoon polished and favorite towel warm and dry. It's about the cycles of stewardship and stages of life. The garden warms my muscles up: the Sun already high at 7am, the work of carrying my watering can back and forth from spigot to potatoes, from spigot to peppers and herbs, offering a drink to the impatiens and lilies on my way.
Mother pokeweed invited me to spend some extra time today, taking another round of photos of Her facing the Sun. The most beautiful surprise was finding the first buds of what will become flowers and later berries! I've been waiting for them as patiently as I can, which is not patient at all. What a a gift!
Tending the garden allows me to play the sacred role of priestess without a costume, without setting up any special ritual yet still embodying the work. I slide on the green espadrilles that I got from cleaning out my grandmother's apartment - perhaps these shoes are the ritual gear? - and begin work that pulls me into and from myself. A dissolving without dissociation, an embodiment so deep that for 10 or 20 minutes I no longer live in the anxiety behind my eyes or the pain in my knees and knuckles, I am instead alive under Mother Maple and in the light that massages my shoulders. I am alive in the deliciously persistent Sun on my Crown and the refreshing breeze moving through the greenery. I become, or remember that I always have been, a part of the birdsong. I am not an observer behind the wall of a societal veil watching the saplings reach for the sky, I am in the weaving myself, I am a child of the wind and soil. Carrying water is a chore, and a blessing, and possibly one of the simplest and most sacred ways I can embody the assignment of being human.
On my way back inside from the Garden Work today I found myself looking along the fence line where I had trimmed grapevine and other creeping tendrils back, releasing some weight from an already leaning and sun bleached wooden fence. A section I'd trimmed significantly was already returning, and all I could do was smile. When they cut you down, grow back. The fence is propped up by a tire and a wood pallet, and enough vines had been removed to ease the burden on its shoulders. I want to see how far the grapes make it, maybe build a relationship and make some dinner out of the leaves. Relationship is the intersection of sharing labor and fruits, of tending the fence and the property and gratefully accepting the gifts of Mother Earth. I cannot shy away from what is offered and still pray for abundance, abundance lives in reception and recognition and use with care. Perhaps I can make stuffed grape leaves and stuffed peppers, and when the compost has turned I’ll mix it with fertilizer and water and bring the offering back to the vines along the fence.
My hands smell like tomatoes from photographing her flowers and lifting leaves to see new buds. My eyes are full of joy from the potted impatiens turning their Valentine faces, red-pink-white, to the Sun. I think I'll save dishes for lunchtime, another sacred lesson of housework being when to put it to the side for a moment and just live. There is always time to wash dishes, but early June only shows up to visit once a year and what a shame it would be to turn away such a guest when they've arrived in their best blues and greens, their most expensive and favorite perfume. I'm going to save the sweeping and sorting and folding for later, going to slip into those inherited green espadrilles of the queen of pentacles, going to engage in a summer affair with the Sun from my front porch.
Wishing you all the most beautiful sun kissed season, and always with all my love,
Honey