you can’t always tell by looking…
Happy first day of Spring!?
Here in New Jersey the buds are barely peeking out of the cold dirt. The sun is shining, but the wind is blowing away its warmth. It doesn't feel exactly like the golden, flowery, fragrant, newness I was craving.
The day reminds me of a poem - The Seven of Pentacles, by Marge Piercy. It's a poem my mom wrote down in a book for me before she died. I didn't love it when I first read it as a 25-year-old. It seemed unglamorous, plodding. But now, after becoming a parent myself, after learning to honor the unglamourous plodding of it all, I take heart in its message...
by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
So, what do you think? Are you fighting persistently as the creeper? On this first, cold day of spring, are there connections being made, possibly somewhere we can't yet, see?
You are building real things - I know it - slowly, persistently, gnawing in the dark. Take this moment to recognize your work, the work of those you love. This is just the beginning.
