Dirt, What Have You Asked of Me?

by Laurie Klein

What fertile fields our lives become for the slow growth of grace.
–G. D. Watson

For me, to work earth, even briefly, is to become an artist of silence. By turns I am creator, work-in-progress, and beholder. Regardless which role I inhabit, assorted strata beckon, some fertile, some less productive. Sister Wendy Beckett, art historian and contemplative nun, subdivides silence into categories: relative, reflective, and waiting silences.

But this sounds mystical.

I do not tiptoe through Stargazer lilies, swathed in unbleached gauze and patchouli. I have yet to intone Gregorian chant while pulling pigweed. And while I performed Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence” in high school, flower-child-throwback I’m not. Uprooted city-chick was more like it, back in 1991 when Will and I moved to the country to revive our gasping marriage. As an artistic director, work ran my world and ideas kept me awake nights. I loved it, but resigned. Goodbye bookstores, galleries, gym, and symphony. “Kill your darlings,” William Faulkner wrote, describing editing, and surely not including one’s spouse.

Reinvention may cost no less than everything. We hosted one killer yard sale, then enlisted friends to help transfer the remains, which included three islands of lupine much too large to be moved. That evening after everyone left, I lingered outside, transfixed in that moment when twilight proposes silence. What spilled across fields and lawn was the throaty coo of a mourning dove, a song I hadn’t heard since grade-school days at Gram’s. I was home.

To this day a mourning dove’s call ushers me into a daydream-like state that Sister Beckett calls relative silence. There’s an inner shift, and surrounding noise dims. I am buoyed on the surface of my senses with an ease that’s thoughtful, but not revelatory, as it lacks “the muscle of attentiveness.” Burying my face in lilacs or sliding into a hot bath triggers it. Breathing deepens. The heart slows. Relative silence ambushes you.

Consider aspens rustling like taffeta, a laid-back sound with no real rhythm, no groove to make you snap your fingers or swing your hips; it’s background, scored for dreamers. Charmed, but not yet enchanted, I’m still tethered to wristwatch, easily irked by a mate’s casual edging, or crabgrass between the pavers. I remain hinged to my own concerns, like petals that flex to unsettle a bee. But I do relax.

That initial country dove foreshadowed an ensuing education in silence. Bird of luck to the Japanese, the acceptable sacrifice to Jews, cherished by Muslims, and for Christians, a manifold symbol for peace and the Holy Spirit, doves inspire multitudes in quest of quietude. In the wake of its call that night, a hush rippled inward, auspicious on the eve of reinventing home.

When a girl hears the first dove of spring, superstition decrees she take nine steps forward, nine back. To complete this nostalgic ritual that night, I would have searched my shoe for one hair of the man I would marry. But no, I’d stick with Will, unpacking indoors and whistling, one of my pet peeves. He does it so loudly.

“Come hear this,” I called. The liquid notes quieted him, too. Now, I think of Coleridge, who penned what the dove says: “I love and I love!” The reason we were standing there at all.

Subsequent mornings, however, renewed reasons to mourn. In sacrificing work that had been my life’s passion–even for love–grief was inevitable. It wasn’t that my former life was wrong, but letting go meant closure, respecting what had been good to embrace what we hoped would be better. Like iris rhizomes, over eighteen years we’d become enmeshed. Needing healthy space and a dream to build together, we renewed our vows, then began remodeling our cedar rancher, marrying Euro-eccentric decor with latent post-granola tendencies. Work indoors supplied its potpourri of latex enamels, glues, and sawdust. Outside, I planned blowsy, herbaceous borders like Gram’s. I didn’t realize I’d be tending low desert terrain atop endless rock in a mini-snowbelt. In my new digs, I had dialed into an alien ecosystem. Nevertheless, I ferried in plants by the carload.

As spring segued into summer, death would continue to coach me. Hapless perennials would croak by the dozens, victims of an earnest but grieving gardener. Mis-planted, over-pruned, and under-watered.

The lupines thrived, and therein lay another silence, albeit a smug one as I gloated over leafy mounds, bright with dew. I anticipated floral spikes like Roman candles.

Within days the lupines disappeared, and I sank to my knees, speechless. Cue panpipes and muted strings to underscore sheer bewilderment. I was approaching relative silence’s dark side. Daydreams turn surreal there, and once-dependable emotions mutate, like marital stalemates resurfacing, sprouting runners. I stared, horrified, as a stem of lupine trembled, then vanished, sucked into the bowels of the earth–or some rodent. I yelled. I swore. I wrung my hands. I may have jumped up and down. Dirty, root-sucking vermin, how dare they!

My vendetta was immediate, focused, comprehensive: I scouted gopher holes, blocked and flooded them, lit pesticidal bombs to smoke ‘em out, even considered pushing pins in dolls. The lupines died.

I planted more. Will suggested saying Uncle as a less obsessive response. I conceded, through clenched teeth, that perhaps I was overreacting.

Ever-so-slightly.

The gophers, meanwhile, multiplied.

This gnawing away at the roots mirrored my past. I’d always felt driven to make an impact. If I paused to behold my projects, it was with momentary pride or dismay at their outcome before moving on. I relished creativity’s noise, its spectacle, surprises. In marriage, as in my garden, wasn’t artistic control the ideal? I was, of course, attempting to reshape both gender and nature’s innate chaos, infinitely stubborn and intricate. Yet trowel in hand, I preferred scratching away at topsoil, ignoring the double digging that gardens and relationships alike require. Now, this country quiet felt hostile, rife with subterranean munching. Who would save me from silence’s rogue side? Then again, what if those wretched gophers were sent as mentors? A sick thought, I decided, and brushed it away.

In those early years of working the earth, guilty stillness always permeated the site of horticultural corpora. I felt as if Mother Eve and all my ancestors were glaring.

Like most gardeners, I have killed, and will again, plumbing the silent secrets of green.

II
True silence is the speech of lovers … a garden enclosed … “
–Catherine de Hueck Doherty

WHO needed those thumping protestant hymns? As a kid, “My Father’s World” was my favorite: the morning light, the lily white, God’s voice everywhere. The lyrics also hinted at celestial harmonies first postulated by Copernicus. “And to my listening ears,” the first stanza reads, “all nature sings, and round me rings, the music of the spheres.” Lying in the grass at dusk, I would sometimes sense an eerie, hovering, crystalline tone, like a wet finger circling a snifter’s rim. Was that it?

“Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Gram said, when asked. De-clumping daylilies always distracted her. I pitied those bulbs she wrenched apart and sunk into new orbits around the mother plant.

My father scoffed, waving a hand. “Airy-fairy. Is your homework done?” But I had sensed something. Who else could I ask?

I would walk to Draper Hall, the downtown convent where, occasionally, nuns ghosted between three-story columns. They’d never spoken to me, but a good question might rouse them.

Now I realize they were probably practicing Lectio Divina, wherein a sacred text is held in mind until, like groundwater, illumination seeps into the spirit. This exemplifies Sister Beckett’s reflective silence, meditative, imaginative. It engages memories. Recalling the sisters, who smiled but never did answer my question, I suspect this kind of silence withholds its deeper rewards for those who search, and this seduces me.

Books on spirituality claim nothing kindles faith and creativity like envisioning. To meditate on poetry, conversations, creative projects–especially while doing rhythmic, repetitive work–frees intellect for insight. I’ve had mixed results.

While grubbing up thistles, I imagine trumping past arguments, one-upping adversaries with verbal zingers. I compose dazzling blurbs that expose the ignorance of editors who have rejected my work. Then again, if, while clearing out rocks and old resentments, I role-play wise and loving answers, even fictionally, mind and tongue are primed for future success.

Reflective silence employs language. Working alone amid the static of grasshoppers in the zinnias, calm interior dialogue, like a pressure valve on a hose, monitors stress. Author Catherine de Hueck Doherty notes the word solitary means “alone” in English, but “with everybody” in Russian. Through prayer, our spirits can become an intercessory hospice. Apparently, I should bring all humanity with me into this silence, although that feels crowded for starters. I un-kink the hairpin fence instead, and pray for our marriage. Will and I have been redefining ourselves, individually, and as a couple. We’re minding our tongues, often biting them. An ancient proverb says: “In much speaking one cannot avoid sin.” I resolve to ration my remarks.

Then, while amending soil I spy a rodent and, fuming over it, deplete my newly imposed word quota. I light more gopher bombs. This is my garden, and I want it the way I want it. For myself. Like hummingbirds that swivel and joust at feeders, I’m simultaneously letting off steam and staking out territory.

Ideally, though, reflective silence shapes me: I am the work-in-progress. If I tell Will this, he’ll smile knowingly and lead me to bed. Humility is sexy at the end of a day spent with water, wind, and the patient flowers. We fold into one another like petals.

Doherty likens falling in love to spiritual union with God. Talking is optional. Maybe intimacy and awe are muscles, atrophied by fast-lane living. A cross-section of urban drone may include jackhammers, radios, engines, horns, canine commentary, and 747s. One source estimates 16,000 separate sensory impressions bombard Americans daily; another declares I get more information in a day than Gram did in a month. Even rural life can be fraught with traffic: cyber, vehicular, relational.

Concentration and love affect hearing, too. They help me observe myself and others with bemused compassion. What I need is the ear of a bride or new mother, attuned to every silence. If I’m honest, though, I’d rather be the maker than the made. Sometimes I find passivity excruciating. Might as well be a daylily bulb in the hands of Gram.

So what’s a conflicted, co-dependent, Type A, budding contemplative to do? On a whim, I forked out two bits for a used garden gate: seven pickets braced by a sturdy Z and fitted with hardware, bent and rusting. The genius of the thing is its dis-attachedness. Prop it anywhere and, via imagination, invent an entrance. Currently lashed to an arbor, my gate creates a point of departure to realms beyond, where something grander suggests itself. It’s an icon, a corridor through which I can move: physically, intellectually, and spiritually. What if I mirror its opening, make myself more available to Will? To God?

Through inhabiting reflective silence, I can, perhaps–in the manner of garden dioramas once arranged in pharaohs’ tombs–erect an alternate world. I am still waiting to hear the music of the spheres.

III
These feet of clay. And now, the rain.

DIRT, what have you asked of me?

I’ve returned to city grime and din. Subwoofers in adjacent lanes rattle me, sitz bones to fillings. I wince at flourescent hums and neon sputters, cringe over the asthmatic wheeze of bus doors. After harvesting lavender at dawn, vibrating with soused bumblebees, civilization’s noise squares itself, exponentially. It seems the larger I’ve grown within, the smaller I feel.

When I worked with children I used to lock eyes with them, lower my voice and whisper: “It takes every person in this room to make silence.” Surprised, enchanted, they would. Amid city cacophony, now I think of the poet W. S. Merwin who wrote “In the silence / one note is missing.” Maybe it’s me. I’m jangled, cross with Will at the list of errands. Yet even here at Costco, a crowded wholesale warehouse, true contemplatives claim I can surrender to waiting silence. Another poet, Li-Young Lee, describes silence as primal, pregnant, a saturation of presence. If it’s available here, it’s located somewhere near the Spokane Aquifer that snakes off to Idaho: deep, slow, and circuitous as roots. I should emulate hummingbirds. At dusk they tank up, offsetting heartbeats that will slow drastically enough to allow sleep. Of course, sometimes they don’t wake up.

Sister Beckett describes waiting silence as both an emptying and an immersion, “a directed stillness which receives rather than acts.” Prayer comes through you instead of from you. I can’t prune the apple tree without studying it first, allowing the mute limbs to show me where air is wanted. Some branches, rather than reaching out, jackknife into the tree’s center. After beholding them, with the sure bite of steel I can free that tree to dance in its own space.

In waiting silence, listeners move beyond language and ideas. Something secluded and Eden-like ticks within. Call it garden time wherein seeds, like spring-sown Houdinis, have picked their own locks and now pause, resting before a lone sprout muscles toward light. It’s transformative: gophers are cousins, griefs are gifts, and husbands, best friends. Saints of old called this silence ecstasy. Is it any wonder people pander a street drug by that name?

At home, deep breathing helps me enter waiting silence, but I also close doors and light sandalwood candles as talismans. Then grace takes over. Now, dwarfed by floor-to-ceiling wares, I push my cart down the gardening aisle. I am but a beginner: one shovel, one leaking hose. To enter deep silence in public unnerves me. Checkout lines seem endless. I want to run away, or rant. Suspend language? How?

“The truest prayer,” Doherty writes, “is simply union with God.” Entering a new orbit.

I must power down the satellite dish of the senses, let the intellect gently fold its wings, and risk the soul to nothingness, trusting a greater power sustains it. Rest, surrender, detachment–these are thresholds to the final artistic act: beholding. In short, I become my own gate.

IV
Weed and harrow the soul; uproot self; sow the word within.
–Catherine de Hueck Doherty

CHRISTMAS is coming. I stake paperwhites, water the amaryllis. St. Joseph haunts me today, the silent one who adopted God and was never heard from again in the gospels. He just lived them.

“The more I speak,” Henri Nouwen wrote, “the more I will need silence to remain faithful to what I say.”

Every detachment is taxing. Goodbye hurts more when you’ve raised that lupine from a peat pot, even though pain is both blight and potential root-boost. Regardless of weather, rodents, and anemic soil, why not aim to grow, throw wide the gate, cultivate silence? To partner the dance that powers the seasons, that’s my hope, Will’s hand in mine, God’s breath on the scruff of my neck.