More Gardening, More Thinking~ Keeping Things Simple

Tuesday has rolled around again and this then, is my self-appointed day for doing weekly blog updates through the summer season; it's been such a busy week, it's hard to know where to start.  I'm continuing to put plants and seeds into the garden. I'm trying a rough variation on the "Lasagna Gardening" method which is to say that I'm layering seeds in with seedlings and established plants and just letting them grow up alongside one another as they will; it's very like my parenting style, actually!  The heirloom tomato plants and all my herbs are going in today; I still have various herbs out there from last year, most notably the Sage which not only wintered over beautifully but was green, full and gorgeous in March!  Today, the basil, parsley and lavender are going in; I kept them sitting in the kitchen windowsill well beyond their health and happiness because I enjoy looking at them, and then I moved them outdoors to harden but they are uncomfortably snug in their pots now so it's past time to get them in the ground.  Beyond that, I'm organizing my home and environs in preparation leaving town to head back to the UP in less than two weeks which involves, among other things, getting the summer clothes out and the winter clothes packed away and making sure that the summer yard work is caught up and things are capable of minimal effort on their behalf while we're gone.  None of it is being done with terrifically good humor because I mostly want to stay outdoors and just hang out there!  I've been out walking for over an hour every day though, and that allows me both the satisfaction of getting my exercise in ( no running for me right now, after 30 plus years due to a gamey knee over the last two years which isn't healing entirely; I can walk the 5 or 6 miles daily but running causes pain and then lay offs, not worth it ) plus being outside in the air and weather which allows me ample "thinking and wondering" time.  I also take Mary on a walk or two every day for her Nature Study ( within the neighborhood, this is confined largely to interesting flowers, bugs on the ground, and birds, squirrels and chipmunks but she has a seemingly boundless interest in the daily, normal run of the world so she doesn't get bored with any of it; she always finds something new to notice about the same things! ) and today we're trying a new procedure which involves duct tape turned inside out around her wrist where she can "stick" little plants, sticks and interesting whatevers' that she finds making her discoveries into a bracelet easily observed and thought about later.

Reading through a short and lovely little book ('Journeys of Simplicity~Traveling Light' by Thomas Harndon) about fairly famous people who've been known to live very simple lives materially and found great inner freedom and richness doing so.  I'm always interested in these stories and find them inspirational and encouraging to my own efforts to do the same.  So in closing out this weeks post, I'll include the following little piece about someone whose life has been a source of admiration and conviction about how to live, love and serve people

for me for many years; Dorothy Day.  She was an American journalist, devout Roman Catholic, stalwart pacifist, holy troublemaker and cofounder, with Peter Maurin, of the Catholic Worker movement:

 "For fifty years, she lived among America's urban poor, usually in one of the "houses of hospitality" that she and Peter Maurin established to shelter and serve homeless people.  She distrusted government and its programs and believed that Christian themselves should perform the works of mercy:  feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thristy, visit the imprisoned, care for the sick, bury the dead.  Through her newspaper ( The Catholic Worker; I still get it and it's still, as it was during the Depression, only 1 cent per copy ) her books, and her sometimes solitary witness, Dorothy Day "comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable."  As a model of simplicity and detachment from "things", she had only the following in her room at the Catholic Worker house in Brooklyn, NY:  Ascending up two flights of stairs, devoid of any luxury, one finds simple furniture, a couple of chairs, an old wardrobe and a cot.  Next to the bed, a tiny statue of St. Joan of Arc wearing armor.  A manual typewriter.  Opera on the radio; Wagner.  A shelf of well-thumbed books, the old favorites:  the Bible, Tolstoy, Dickens, Desert Fathers, Bernanos, Silone, Dostoyevsky. 

 Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers ate the plain and sometimes scant food they made available for the people who needed it, and they wore clothing that came from various second- hand sources, including funeral homes; the castoffs of those who had died.  They worked tirelessly among the poor of the inner city and never wavered in their belief that it was their duty to challenge, as Dorothy put it "this filthy rotten system" that created such hardship, poverty, violence, war and hatred in the world.

                                       

I have a quote from her written on a slip of paper in my prayer book; it was taken from her autobiography, 'The Long Loneliness': "Love in action a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."   The implications of that idea, that love in action is difficult and challenging and not the stuff of romantic notions about the "feeling" of love, but that we speak our love through how we care for, and serve others; not just those closest to us, but those on the other side of the world, and the land, and the air we breathe, and the multitude of creatures we share the planet with.  Love in action is hard work but it's the kind of love that brings wholeness and peace.  Traveling light and simplifying our inner and outer lives helps us to carve out the necessary space for reflection and contemplation of the deeper realities and gives us clear vision. Dorothy Day worked for justice and peace and she is an ever-present reminder to me of what it means to be fully human and fully alive....and with that fine reminder of what is important and precious, out into the garden once again!

Have a great week, everyone!

Michelle.