The Secret Garden
I worked in my garden beds recently, pulling out the ivy and blackberry vines to make room for new veggies and flowers. It was hard work, and as I made small dents in the density of it I also watched the thoughts creep in, “Why haven’t you kept up with this, you don’t work at it enough,…so and so probably never lets their garden overgrow…,” and so on.
As I was feeling overwhelmed by the brambles, feeling like it was impossible to manage, images from the book the “Secret Garden” kept appearing. This is one of my favorite books, one that is so wise, and so wondrous, I want to read it over and over. And I do.
Mary Lennox is a little 10 year old girl abandoned by neglectful parents who then died and then left her to a distant uncle, who is also currently not home because he can’t face the grief of his own wife dying. So, many times abandoned, she is wandering around the English Moor. She is utterly lost in the world, sour and empty, but we see her come to life as she goes outside, day after day, and feels the wind on her cheeks, gets to know the birds and trees, walks and walks with an abundance of freedom. She makes a friend with a boy, Dickon, who is from a poor-in-money but rich-in-life family, and they discover a walled-in garden, and find a way inside. The garden is completely overgrown, appears dead, but they are in awe of it. With the confidant imaginations of children, they decide they will weed and prune and water this garden back to life.
This garden of Mary and Dickon’s belonged to the wife who died, and, typical of Anglo culture, the husband simply shut down rather than face the wretched grief, rather than be with his innocent son left behind. The garden was his heart, no longer tended, no longer witnessed, but locked away, out of sight, as was his son. As though it never existed. I tend to be judgmental toward this father, but when my son died, I recall the physical pain I felt when trying to plant flowers, only a month or two later. I couldn’t aid life in that way. I was in the dying part, I needed to be in the receding waters. I understand this time, this pause. It is hard to keep making room for life when we are in the shock of intense loss. There is a need for allowing overgrowth, for going back to the roots, back into the earth for a while, before we tend and join life again. We need to be with death.
Something about the embarrassment of my wild garden and this particular work of cutting back the wild canes so that I could grow something, felt important. Slowly, slowly, one vine at a time, clipping and shaping, finding a way through, was getting to something deep. Continuing, selecting, pruning, moving it to the compost pile, one piece at a time, felt like the work of grief. It can feel enormous and impossible, and painful. It can feel embarrassing to take as long as it does in a culture of “clap, clap, get it done, move on.” To do the slow, methodical work. This work that we need to keep doing, year after year. Sometimes we put our hand in to pull up ivy and there is a stick full of thorns there and it really hurts! The process, of grief, of gardening, can be demoralizing in moments. It can feel like there is too much, we will never find our way through, or it has been this way, overgrown and shut down, for so long, we might not be able to make a change. It is too dark, too gnarled.
I find it very beautiful that it is the sour, wan, little angry girl that brings the spark of life back to the dead garden. Not a glowing, happy hero, but one that is finding her life force in the mire of someone else’s wild grief. She can see in her heart’s mind, where the flowers could grow again, as she finds a reason to live, as she is remade, with her hands to the soil. We can’t force the timing of when a garden shifts. It unfolds. And if we look at the story as we might a fairy tale, in which each character is a part of one psyche, we can see her in ourselves. I certainly can. She is the one who is trimming these brambles and feeling like she has done it all wrong, and no one will approve of her, but something leads her to keep going. Her inheritance with the soil and bees and robins is felt and stirs her on. Stirs her wish for creation of something new. And rooting into it all, belonging to it.
I noticed that right now there is a wren family making a nest in our bird house, there are hummingbirds zooming by, the sun is warm and a breeze is moving the blackberry leaves and flowers. I am in my garden, and I am finally ready to shape it again, to ask it again, if we might work together to grow some beautiful plants. This is my work, my soul’s timing. This is my yard, in which you can feel the years of the exhaustion and bright colors of grief mixed with hope and life and effort and surrender. This is my garden, and my pain and my tears and my heart. This is my little angry Mary, and my tortured, numb Father, and the wise, cheerful Dickon, coming together to open the gate and face the beauty of the love that is possible there. Where the forgotten son learns to walk. One vine at a time.
