Breaking Point: How A Failed Garden Brought Me Back To Life
Late last winter I decided to try my hand at gardening. I transformed my kids’ craft room into a full-blown nursery. Since I’m not one to do anything on a small scale, I ordered 8ish seed starting greenhouses, which are basically trays of 75 seed pods with a plastic cover. To those counting, that’s roughly 600 seeds. Yep, that’s right. Having never had a successful garden before, I decided to start 600 seeds indoors, in February. If this isn’t starting to sound like a mental breakdown to you, then you are not a gardener.
I carefully tended to my little seedlings, who were basically doing abysmally, but I thought they were doing great! I watered them and talked to them and rotated them in front of the single tiny window in the room. Most of the plants shot up quickly and got very leggy (a term which I learned basically means bad) reaching for the teensy bit of sunlight trying to force its way through the late February gray.
I decided these little plantlings needed some more help. So we ordered a greenhouse and my wife spent the better part of holy Saturday erecting the 4x6 foot plexiglass structure. Unable to wait, I loaded all my plant babies into a wagon and slid them onto shelves in the early morning of Easter Sunday. That day, however, a windstorm swept through and my newly built greenhouse along with my plant babies toppled over crushing pretty much all of the remaining survivors of my original 600 seeds. I definitely found a way to secure the greenhouse after that.
As I’m writing this I realize it sounds like a sad story. However, to me, this was a moment in my life where I knew I should feel upset, but I didn’t. I felt release. Not because I had gotten out of the daily task of watering and watching my little seedlings, but because I honestly didn’t care about the end result. This may be unethical as a gardener (I’m not sure), but as a spiritual being working on the art of letting go and being present, this was a revelation.
In order to provide you with a little more context. The winter of 2020 for me, like for most people in the world, was a very dark night of the soul. I had entered into the pandemic after a particularly traumatic event and by the time the winter of 2020/21 rolled around I was in a full-blown depression. Full-blown is exactly the right phrase. I was scattered. I was broken. I was waiting for someone else to put me back together, and by January of 2021 I realized that that person was me. I did not feel equipped for that task.
I began my gardening journey as a way to get out of my head and get into my body by using my hands. I wanted to do something that felt good and that was productive. I was going to have this beautiful, lush, nourishing garden with flowers dancing in between rows of onions and kale. I had planned for and constructed a tunnel for the beans and peas to run up and fill out that my children could play under, reading books and giggling conspiratorially. The fantasy of this garden kept me going through some very difficult moments.
By the time I actually planted the seeds, the garden in my mind was rival to any english cottage fairytale and I could already taste the sweet sharp tomatoes on my tongue. I felt like a combination of Joanna Gaines, Anne of Green Gables, and Rosie the Riveter as I pushed the little seeds into their peat discs and placed them under the clear plastic dome that promptly fogged up. Every time I watered them I pictured them soaking it in, thanking me for loving them so well.
The thing about not knowing what the hell you’re doing is that however it happens you are going to learn. Either you will find out the information you need beforehand and you will listen to experts and let them teach you or you will fluster your way through, experimenting and frustrating yourself, and in the end the very thing you are trying to do will teach you how not to do it. Somewhere in between my romanticized beginnings and my epic failure, my plants taught me how not to garden, but they also taught me how to grow, how to live, and how to break with purpose.
One element of the process I did get right was the incubation of my seeds. At least I got it right enough that roughly 450 of them decided to start the process of trying to live outside of their shell. These little seeds allowed me the privilege of leaning over them every day and watching them slowly and steadily break open.
I watched as they received nourishment from the peat, the damp air, and the watering. Each seed, in it own way, in its own time began to soften and tiny breaks would appear in their once hard shells. They would start to poke their first little leaflets out of their dormant state and peek out toward the sun. They would start to grow. Inside of this seed was a whole world just waiting to break forth. I watched as 400+ seeds unfurled themselves into the world.
As I watched them, they taught me something about the grace of being broken. In the summer of 2020 I had a vision of myself at the bottom of a deep pit, curled up, and bruised. As I watched my seeds grow I realized that somewhere along the line I had been covered over with nourishing soil. That’s why it was so dark; so extremely heavy. That’s why I felt abandoned. I had been buried.
By simply being themselves, with no other agenda than to grow, these seeds taught me that everything, at some point needs to be planted. There’s a whole lot more to the life-cycle that deserves to be said, but that is probably a book that needs writing. There’s just not enough room here. However, if we pick up where I was in the winter of 2020, I was in my dirt bed waiting for the moment of breaking.
When my greenhouse tipped over on Easter Sunday, I laughed. I just laughed. The utter stubbornness of a human being that the universe had to literally send a gust of wind to show me that this garden was not going to save me. This fantasy of perfection was not my end goal. The seed that really needed to be nourished was the one inside of me. It was profound and perspective-changing. And for a woman who grew up in the Christian tradition with deep religious wounds, this could not have been a more ironic cosmic move.
It was as if love itself tipped that greenhouse over in order to tell me to stop all my laboring. Stop trying to “fix” myself. Stop working so damn hard to put myself back together and just break already, damn it!
Thing is, you can’t force your breaking. Every human, like every seed has a different spiritual gestation period. I feel like that Easter was my official planting day. The day I realized I was going to give myself over to this being thing. That I was going to wait; not to be fixed but to learn how to be, just be.
I did plant more seeds and about 25 of them made it into the soil. They all died without ever bearing any of the fruits they carried inside of them. Every last one of them gave their lives for me, they didn’t know it, but they taught me how to wait, and how to die, and how to break, and how to live.
Those seeds gave me back to myself. It was the most productive garden I’ve ever had.
