Today I was supposed to picture myself sitting in a garden. I sat cross-legged, pressed my hands down into the imagined grass, and realized it was sod. Why is it always sod? Uniform, suburban grass squares. Perfectly conforming. Predictable. Status quo lawncare and the only ground cover the neighborhood association will accept, and yes, you should treat it with chemicals that make the earth recoil because nothing matters but your reputation.
How can I pray on a square of sod? Nothing this perfect is real. What kind of meditation drops me down beside a paved driveway under a tree that is too small and perfectly pruned to offer shade? Why can’t I conjure a garden as untamed and raging with life as the first one? A tree in its middle bursting with life and death and all the manifold possibilities in between?
* * * * *
I have always been looking for the garden. The first one. The wild one. The raging, provocative, scandalous, untamed garden. I have always been trying to move toward it. I have always landed on a square of sod.
We will move again soon. When we move, it will not be to the city--that pulsing center of human variety. Not like we dreamed it. Not even a college town--erudite, in a self-aware, comfortable way--where I am certain things smell like books and spices all the time, and everything is (we naively imagine) always wonderful and warm and open.
When we move again it will be, inexplicably, to a new square of sod. Endless, evenly textured green. God forbid our children’s bare feet find pine needles or splintering branches. God forbid the world breaks through in some way.
When we move again the house will look like all the other houses. The world will be safe and confined. An even hum of uninterrupted ease (carefully controlled by local noise regulations) will enfold us.
How can I live on a square of sod? How can I take cleansing breaths (in through my nose, out through my mouth) and press my hands down deep into a world that matters when everything that beautiful has been trimmed away, cleaned up, washed over? What beauty is there in a world where every house (every human), every inch of grass looks like every other? My children have jagged edges and wild colors. They are bright and loud. I am (or at least I was once) bright and loud. I think the broken pieces, the outliers, the reminders of death are beautiful. How do we continue to live in this careful, pastel, muted space, where all the broken things, the dying things, the unfathomable things, are hidden beneath broad swaths of grinning, monochrome green?
* * * * * *
Deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. Press your hands down and look again. The grass is soft and cool. The garden is not what you expected, but it is breathing. Tiny beetles clamber over your fingertips. Centipedes turn over bits of dirt and there are dead things woven into this tangled temple of root and soil. If you listen, you can hear how noisy they are, and how the wind pushes past, changing everything, all of the time.
The real garden will break through, even here. And you will be here to witness it, to
breathe out gratitude as it eats away at the endless perfection, clod of dirt by clod of dirt. You will conspire to help it bear witness to the reality that nothing is ever as safe or unchanging as we’d like it to be--that the beauty of all of this, of any of this, is in the glorious things that will not sit still, or keep quiet, or be draped over in perfectly cut squares that won’t cut our feet or reveal the relentless work of insects and time.
You can’t live here forever, but you can live here for now. You can take deep breaths in and out and let the sun hit your face (imaginary sun, real sun, it doesn’t matter, it all blurs together). Your bright children with jagged edges will cut out a place for themselves here (they already have, haven’t they?), and you’ll dig deep enough beneath the surface with those hands of yours that keep pressing down and down to mine the meaning that’s churning beneath it all. And when they tell you to imagine love coming up beside you, you won’t be able to do it (you never can), but you’ll feel a gentle hand on your back and you’ll hope (not believe anymore, but hope, at least), that love can live anywhere (we can’t bury it forever; it is risen, rising), that prayer (whatever prayer is) can be uttered even in the barren places. Even on this square of sod.
