The Speaking Garden

A garden is an invitation, maybe even a mandate to slow down.   I still use a push plow like I did back fifty years ago.  When the furrows are opened I walk along and drop one seed at a time in the dirt and then when the row is finished, I go back and cover the seed with boots that sweep plowed dirt across the open row.  As I was planting the okra rows this morning, it came to me that a garden is not something to be hurried.  Instead, it is sharing in something sacred.    

As the seed dropped in the ground, I prayed a prayer of blessing on the seed and ask that the earth would receive it and bless it for a harvest some months from now.  Gardens take time.  It takes time to plant.  It takes time to care for it.  It takes time to reap the harvest.  Nothing happens in a hurry.  To walk up and down the rows of open furrow planting okra seed enabled me to hear a word about slowing down, listening, and paying attention to the creative power beneath my feet.     

Of course, a garden is not for everyone.  Many people pass up on a garden not because it takes work, but because it causes life to be lived at a slower pace.  The Creation like the written Word speaks volumes to us about how life is to be lived, but even as we are too busy to sit with the Word for a spell, so are we too busy to hear what is to be heard as we walk behind a push plow and behold the creative power of the earth as it is opened for seed beneath plodding feet.