I walked to water the garden and noticed our banana plant getting ready to produce some very sweet fruit. It’s taken years for this plant to do this. We don’t use chemical fertilizers!
As I admired the beauty, not just of the plant but of the whole process of bearing fruit, I could not help but think of Marge Piercy’s poem.
Please read. I pray it takes root in you as it has in me. Share with others this day as they may need encouragement. The real work is often not visible for a long time. We can’t forget that this is a good time to weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses. It is what will get us through.
The Seven of Pentacles
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.
And consider joining us this October for 4 days of tangling and interweaving in our retreat in the foothills of Tennessee. Click the image for details.
