Kudos to the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati’s Community Gardens Program! They are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year boasting over 70 neighborhood gardens. I have been fortunate to be among the members of this year’s class of nearly fifty participants, which--- due to the Coronavirus-- is currently meeting online. This story begins when we were meeting in person at the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati on Wednesday evenings...
We are nearly a third through the 12 week program. During our two hour weekly meetings, we share a potluck and have opportunities to get to know one other.
I have been impressed with the great diversity of folks who want to initiate their own neighborhood gardens. A multitude of ages, cultures, work histories, backgrounds in terms of gardening know-how are represented here. They seem to have one thing in common: a desire to share their passion with others. One of our members added, We all see the garden as a vehicle to solve a problem.
Greg Potter, Community Gardens Coordinator, has a tall order to fill. How to take this inspiration and drive, and help others in just three months get a more realistic view of what their dream might mean for them and within the community they choose to serve is a gargantuan task. Greg’s gifts in this regard have truly impressed me.
From the start, we had to understand that a community garden---a place to grow vegetables and flowers--- can still mean many things. Perhaps an additional focus is to offer job training and skills, a place for horticulture therapy, a place to house the efforts of a horticulture society already in place, a place whose focus is providing food for the hungry, rather than the gardeners who work there. Greg tells us that each of the 70 gardens is like a spoke in a wheel, and each has its own unique function and personality.
The first thing Greg went about doing was helping class members learn to be community among themselves. What do we have in common? What makes us different from each other? How can we be good listeners and communicate effectively. How do we take the bones of our own vision, share it with others and inspire them to join us?
People will commit to what they co-create, Greg tells us. Change moves at the speed of trust. Trust drives people to do what we need to do together. Connection comes before content. Create a culture of collaboration. Enjoy the gift of wonder that comes with the garden. The importance of understanding and clarifying why we want to start a community garden and how to engage others effectively becomes a foundation for a good beginning.
So by week three, we were ready to hear from three successful community garden coordinators: Gerri Simmons, West End Garden- 941 Poplar Street; Merrie Stillpass, Amberley Community Garden – 7801 Ridge Road and Ann Ivancic, Carthage Community Garden, 124 W North Bend Road.
Gerri, a retired teacher, reminds us that her community gardeners are as young as six years old and as mature as 93! She tells us that her community members live in a food desert, that fresh produce is difficult to come by. Gerri encourages us to keep in touch with gardeners in the way they prefer: email, text, US post office or by word of mouth. She holds one meeting at the beginning of each gardening season, and one at the end, but is engaged with her gardening project year round. Each season there are new problems to solve, new ways to help one another. This past year, among her gardeners there were a handful of deaths, friends or family. Others stepped in to take care of gardening responsibilities, and not to forget the senior center home next door. Those folks look out for our garden, and know exactly what is going on, Gerry adds with a smile.
Merrie explains that her garden is located in what was once a golf course, Crest Hills, in Amberley Village. She describes her neighborhood as a food desert as well. In existence since 2012, this garden has benefited first from a deer fence and an 800 gallon cistern for water which were obtained from grants. Here there are 36 plots, 9 x 15 feet-- for individual gardeners that are directly in the ground. The old caddy shack serves as a tool shed. She has found that creating crews has been successful: one for compost, one for social events, one for ground crew, another for those who serve as row captains and another for maintenance of tools. The Boy Scouts have gotten involved, building a picnic table for the gardeners and community members. Merrie appreciates the support of a nutritionist that has been provided by the Civic Garden Center’s Community Gardening program. She brings a camp stove and provides cooking lessons!
Ann’s community garden is on land that belongs to the Cincinnati Public Schools. She discovered that her community preferred to create a gardening collective. Each member tends one plant family--- their favorite-- and the whole group benefits from the harvest. That makes it easier to rotate the beds so that the soil can be replenished and diseases managed. She wrote a grant for drip irrigation which is run by a solar panel, and advises, be ready for change. The public school owns the land, and the schools needs are often in flux. Therefore, garden boundaries must be modified. Someone drove a multi-terrain vehicle through the beds. The gardeners created a grapevine trellis around the garden to protect it. Ann has found help through collaborating with other like minded community groups.
I am recalling Greg Potter’s powerful words to all of us. Keep the sense of wonder to the forefront of our minds and hearts. What can a garden do for a community? So many things!
New Eyes to See the Coronavirus
This is "the beginning of something that will get worse throughout April and into May... and we've got to change our lives”, says New York governor, Andrew Cuomo.
As we find ourselves knee deep in the Coronavirus, I am grateful to the bones that it is Spring. A time of beginnings, of renewal, of hope-- Everywhere in this Ohio River Valley where I reside, the Earth resonates with new life.
What I have been unable to do in a discombobulated state of fear of the unknown are house projects, deep cleaning and organizing. What my body requires is fresh food and lots of walking. What my mind and spirit have been in need of is time to deal with loss, grief and feeling upended. As a tonic, I am a gardener noticing what is going on each new day as it relates to Spring. Welcoming the blooming bulbs and trees, planting pansies and cool weather vegetables and herbs. Trying to stay in the moment.
I am also struck by how the word “Corona’” is all around me, as something other than a disease. Corona is also the name for the cup or trumpet we see on daffodils.
With that good thought, I look deeper into that trumpet--- close and still enough to hear what it might be telling me. What is that melody it plays now?
This is the song of the daffodil that I hear.
As we experience the awakening of the Earth and our own awakening, we can expect this enormous change to also create chaos within us.
When a seed is planted and watered, it swells and bursts open so that new life can come.
When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, enormous change also occurs. The caterpillar, who has been crawling on and eating its food source, wanders away from what it has been devouring. It finds a sheltered safe place for transformation. As the caterpillar who forms a chrysalis or cocoon is unable to move, it eventually dissolves into an organic soup. “Imaginal cells” that contain the blueprint of the flying creature to come are now at work. They threaten the immune system of the caterpillar, persisting and multiplying until they hit the point of no return. And we have a whole new creature that has no structural similarity with what it once was.
Great spiritual teachers enter into a “dark night of the soul” that also demands isolation. They have said yes to annihilation without any expectation that they will be resurrected. Their attachment to any ideas they have had of God dries up and falls away. The best thing to do is NOTHING, surrender, they say. Drop down into the arms of darkness, surrender to feelings of nothingness. Then an ineffable sweetness that seeps into our souls from the ground of our being can emerge, says writer and teacher, Richard Rohr.
Perhaps there is a deeper more authentic SELF that longs to rise up.
The corona virus which demands an experience of isolation is not unlike a seed buried under the earth, or the formation of a cocoon or a “dark night” of the soul. For those of us who say “Yes” to this transformation, for those of us who can adapt there is great opportunity for self reflection and personal growth.
The undoing of our lives provides rich fodder for new life. We are reminded of Victory Gardens, which were gardens created during WWII when fresh food resources were nil. As a reality, as powerful metaphors, gardens are places that have much to teach us. Everything we do in the garden provides spiritual insight.
On facebook, for as long as the coronavirus demands our attention, I will be posting from my own gardens. To inspire, to encourage, to dig deeper into the fodder of our own lives. Please join me. https://www.facebook.com/peggy.clair
Heart's Ease
It’s spitting snow in the Ohio River Valley this early March day. Cloudy gray skies threaten to add weight to my already heavy heart. What the coronavirus might mean for my country, my friends and family is also spitting a little inner precipitation on my spirit. With clorox wipes and hand sanitizer, I feel the weight of being in possible harm’s way. Both my husband and I fall into the senior age category, and he is compromised with asthma. I am somewhere in between the continuum of listening to news reports about what we know and don’t know and looking for relief elsewhere. Repeatedly washing our own hands, avoiding human contact, and staying away from large crowds is prudent advice, and equally as important--- being very aware of what we feel and think, as it does shape our reality. Keeping fear at bay as much as possible. But how do we deal with yet another calamity, another global crisis? Where outside of home, does it feel safe?
For me, it is a spring clean up in the garden, and long walks in the woods. The kind of day that makes you feel young and vital, hope stirring deep in your bones. Just yesterday outside my own front door, I found the opposite of winter, a healing balm of a lovely, warm spring day.
A magnolia tree was in bloom and swollen forsythia buds were just beginning to open to gold, two or three weeks before their usual emerging. It was heady stuff. So for even more pleasure afterwards, I drove to my neighborhood greenhouse. It was brimming with new life, pansies galore. The word pansy means “hearts-ease”. I had come to the right place. Soothing is exactly what is needed right now.
An enthusiastic woman was buying a huge amount of pansies. Her green light buttons were blinking in the GO position. She was purchasing flowers for her church containers. I asked her if she had a place at home to protect the new plants, a garage with sunny windows--- maybe before they were planted? It was going down to the twenties this weekend. She was astonished, had not thought to check the weather, did not know that flowering may be stunted when green life is not “hardened off” properly in the spring, which means gradually allowing plants to get used to temperature changes and wind. Annuals forced outside too soon without protection may refuse to bloom afterwards.
So my new acquaintance and I chatted. She was grateful for some advice. Sometimes, it is better to let the greenhouse do its job, and just wait awhile. So we savored a new friendship. And the thought that if folks were venturing out to go to her church, they would soon be greeted by such happy pansy faces was a comfort to me too.
I could worry that the new blooms I saw on my walk would be ruined. That the flowers would be spoiled and burned from this weekend’s cold. And that the strange weather patterns we are experiencing as temperatures rise above normal and crash below normal in greater frequency will only bring more calamity to our flower and food supply, our bees, our whole ecosystem. Or I could simply enjoy this very moment. That I was out here to witness what many others do not even notice or value. Yes, there is a great deal we cannot control, we might not even be able to protect our loved ones and ourselves, our gardens. But I know this to be true. Where I can protect and nurture, I will do it. I will keep planting, keep looking for signs of life, continue to seek the soothing rhythms of nature when I can find them. That is the gift of the garden right now, as spiritual and real metaphors abound there.
Some believe that by simply touching the earth, or digging into the soil, or even lying on the ground, you are enabling a powerful source of healing to enter into your body. There is a wondrous yogic practice I have learned of imagining that I am fusing with the earth by lying on my mat on my back, each side and then front of my body. Here in the silence, I use my breath to allow anything that is refuse, or illness, or fear to fall away into the arms of the Great Mother where it can be safely composted and changed back into something good. God imbued breath doing its own spring house cleaning!
When it warms up again, I will be planting kale, lettuce, spinach and arugula seeds. Eating fresh greens when we might be asked to remain at home. Delighting in tiny violas and pansy faces. All of that ‘“green energy”--- the clean air plants provide--- filling me up, when fear threatens to take us down.
May we all find our ways to a practice of “hearts-ease” during these difficult days. Namaste.
A Rough Spring
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Yesterday, I was cross. Irritated by urban life, the tumultuous changes in Spring weather and my own crotchety self. Brown magnolia blossoms. Loud vibrating, fast driving cars. Enormous potholes. Trash strewn everywhere. Crying babies unattended. And no grocery employee had brought hanging Boston fern baskets inside away from the cold snowy April weather. Now, after a tender beginning in a warm greenhouse, they were burned and frozen. Disposable. Rubbish. Life in the 21st century.
Today I made another trip, to another grocery store to purchase salmon. I was standing at the fish and meat counter waiting my turn. A woman was there with a child about seven or eight years old. He stood quietly handling bottles of tartar sauce displayed near the case, as if he were rearranging them. He had such a sweet expression and a beautiful smile. I told the woman that I loved his gentle countenance. She said, “He’s going to come over and hug you”, which is exactly what happened. He put his face into my butterfly scarf and nestled down against my chest.
“Do you like those butterflies?” I asked him. He nodded. “I wore this scarf today to help Spring come,” I continued. He returned to the woman. We chatted, and before we parted, the boy came once again. Another hug. Another chance to connect. This time he tried to feel the hair on my head. The woman discouraged him. “That’s fine,” I said. I explained that I used to be a teacher, and often children wanted to touch each other’s hair, especially if it was different from their own.
Once again, he nestled his face into the scarf. His small hands grasped the soft cotton. I hugged him and held on tight before we said goodbye. I thanked him for the hug.
What was that sweet encounter? Did the child need Spring as much as I did, and we had found each other, just in the knick of time? Or was he simply a teacher, a helper to me? The return of kindness, gentleness, new life, hope stirred within me... a reminder to see beyond racial and cultural differences, economic status and education, history. He reminded me of my value, even as I am in transition, betwixt and between. I saw right through to his lovely heart, and he recognized me. We found Spring together for a few brief moments at the grocery store. An answered prayer after my embittered yesterday. “God change me. Soften my eyes so that I can see what you see,” I had prayed last night. Here was the answer.
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Looking for Hope in the Heavens
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Dreadful news has been the theme this autumn 2017. We are saturated each week with accounts of some new disaster. It is depressing to even list them. One of my twelve year old students told me that the world must be coming to an end. What a horrible thing for a child to try and grasp. And even for us adults, we wonder, how could these events ever be about something good, something transformative, something that engenders hope.
So, as I look optimistically in all of this darkness, I am recalling my thoughts on the amazing solar eclipse that we experienced just weeks ago. With our eyes to the sky, millions watched as the magic took us--as a nation, into its mystery--- looking for far more than a solar eclipse. I wonder if we are desperate to have an encounter with the divine, the author of hope, to find the place where science and spirituality meet. And that is the challenge today to live with hope, rather than despair.
It was a ninety degree day here in Cincinnati as we experienced our 2017 solar eclipse. Some schools closed so that children throughout the United States could view it safely with their parents. Others traveled hundreds of miles to witness the “total” eclipse, waited in long lines of traffic, purchased safety glasses and even wore welder’s masks. I witnessed the event at a public library where I could borrow cardboard glasses with safety lenses. A quick glimpse of a black dot was enough for me. We did not experience a dramatic black out at the library. But I loved the sharing of glasses, the friendly banter, the sense of community, the diversity of neighbors who never met one another before gathering for this unusual event.
What was happening outside in my garden, I wondered as I drove home. From the white rocking chair on the north side of the house, I could view what was truly fascinating to me, a mystical quality to the light.
The vibrant crescent of sun, mostly hidden by the moon, spilled out like the gold in Gustav Klimt’s paintings. It glimmered as if it were light on water. The garden, lit up from within while a cool protective veil sat over the top of it, became stained glass. The scene beckoned inner reflection and awe, as if someone was stepping from the outdoors into the coolness of an ancient church. The birds were still singing, the crickets still chirping, the butterflies were flitting from from flower to flower, seemingly unaffected. Excited neighbors were outdoors with their dark glasses. “Do you want to see this?” I could hear someone say. An airplane flew over ahead. But the magical quality of air and light were simply stunning. The garden had become art. The shade was darker. The light was brighter, and I discovered this phenomenon called “shadow bands”. It was also strangely dark in my own house, while oddly lit outside.
As light and dark melded, this metaphor seemed so lovely. The masculine sun energy was softened by the moon’s maternal silky shadows. She has no light of her own, but is reliant upon the sun's light to reflect or mirror her image. Where the sun boldly shines, the moon’s light is subtle, offers clarity and reflection. This lovely feminine moon, draped in a veil was meeting her husband, the sun, as folklore and ancient tradition implies. Perhaps the new way to live in 2017: the marriage of light and darkness, the feminine and masculine, the questions that seem to have no easy answers. The falling temperatures almost made the air smell sweet and light, as if it has been newly bathed. It is somehow sensual, even sexual. A long kiss, an embrace, a magical moment that won’t come again for another 350 years. It seemed to beg these questions. Can darkness live in peace with light? Can our own inner shadows meld with the Light within each of us? Does this wondrous event carry a message of hope?
Keep your eyes on the sky, and your inward eyes open too, as our symbolically feminine moon offers a rare October Harvest Moon (they usually occur in September). This moon only has appeared and will appear 18 times between 1970 and 2050, and it happens this evening! In North America, a Harvest Moon (a yearly event) refers to the first full moon nearest the autumnal equinox which was September 22. The moon rises a little earlier than usual-- more light for farmers to harvest. And the moon will rise nearer to sunset and appear full for several days in a row -- making it seem as if there is more than one full moon. Perhaps that is exactly what we need right now.
"The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished."
~Ming-Dao Deng
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A Fresh Start
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After a bit of a break, I am back to writing and encouraging creative projects to grow. I have been on an interior journey of my own personal garden these last few years. Illness and age draw you along deeper paths that demand exploration and attention. They also help you see how valuable the precious moment is and which dreams require energy and devotion.
A college memory helps to rekindle my present and future work. In my early twenties, I was taking a painting class at Wittenberg University, and even considering becoming an art teacher. A group of us were asked to describe our favorite artist and why we were drawn to them. Artists such as Rembrandt, Manet, Monet, Picasso were mentioned. When it was my turn, I proudly announced “Grandma Moses”, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961). The class and the professor burst out laughing. I recall, while smirking, the professor asking why in the world would I say something like that? I stated a simplified version of the following.
Grandma Moses raised her family in the beauty of the natural world in Virginia and New York, near the Vermont border. When she finished that most important work, she went on to teach us about her life by remembering all of those years through her paintings. She did not need the approval of anyone, nor did she require a formal art education. She felt led to memorialize her times, her days with a paintbrush. She captured stories, not just of the landscape, but all of the people she knew at work on the farm. Everyday folks found them charming and beautiful.
Anna was encouraged to be creative as a child, drawing on large sheets of paper her father provided. She made paints from natural items, and when she ran out of wallpaper in a room--- finished it with her own mural. She turned to painting when it became too painful to do embroidery work with her hands. Anna tried unsuccessfully to sell her paintings in a nearby drugstore. They seemed to just collect dust. She was later discovered by an art dealer when she was 78 years old and continued to paint after she turned 100 years old--- more than 1,500 canvasses.
Years later, I would visit the Bennington Museum in Vermont that houses the largest public collection of Grandma Moses’ works. I could feel her love of landscape, of seasons, of weather and light. She understood how creativity and community were essential to a good life. She knew hard work as the wife of a farmer, of the loss of five out of ten of her children either stillborn or in infancy. Yet, a real optimism shone forth from her paintings, as if she understood how to take the bitter with sweet and make something good from it.
Without knowing these details, I had loved her work as a college student. She was an ordinary hard working woman who told stories through the artistic endeavors that were available to her. That seemed so laudable, so worth celebrating, so important to honor in all of us.
Illness can cause depression and hopelessness, and yet somehow engender new life. We look to others to stir life within us. I recalled a conversation with a sort of psychic healer I had when I was in my thirties. A single Mother, I was feeling lost, adrift and unclear about the next step. The elderly woman I came to vist lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She attended mass every morning and took communion. “When you go the rail to take the bread and wine, stay there and take a few deep breaths”, she began. “The energy there is healing, and will benefit you.” She read my palm, among other sorts of tasks that gave her clues into my life. “You will live a long life, working into old age, doing what you love to do.” She smiled warmly at me.
I’d never visited such a woman before, and might be the first to negate the advice of such a person. However, her words have stayed with me even when I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on any longer. I go to the communion rail, and take my three deep breaths just as she advised, and now I find hope in what she “read’ on my own hand.
I think of my 22 year old self choosing Grandma Moses as a sort of hero, a kind of person to emulate. She loved her farm, I love my garden. She used a paintbrush, I use words. So I hope you will join me once again as I hope to bring new life to my own creative endeavors: a book to be published, and a CD to be recorded. Here is a taste of those two projects. Our own Cincinnati Art Museum is highlighting an exhibition of folk art through September 2, 2017. For more information: http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/art/exhibitions/a-shared-legacy/