The Ground of My Being

We’re having a rainy summer here in Maine. I don’t mind. In fact, I feel grateful when I’m reminded how many billions of people are suffering extreme heat conditions and other severe weather around the planet.

It does make it challenging to get outdoors, however. When a day off coincides with no rain, I disappear into the garden.

This was my first spring in our new house. Last spring and summer were necessarily about surviving the move. Outdoor work consisted of picking up trash and getting to know our little piece of the world.

This spring I went to work as the snow melted, raking, pulling weeds, thinking about where to put a compost system, laying out new beds. A morning here, an afternoon there, a snatched few hours in between work and life’s other demands.

I notice when I do put everything aside to play in the garden I’m filled with toxic shame at the end of the day. Certainly, I dug and weeded, knelt and stooped, barrowed and raked, pruned and planted and trimmed until I was sore and exhausted as well as renewed by my time under the sky on the earth’s body. In proportion to my joy I feel self-hatred. I did not work in the house. I did not pay bills. I did not do laundry. The sink is full of dirty dishes. The cats didn’t get my attention. I didn’t work on my blog or fiction. Instead, I ground dirt into my hands and nails, into the knees of my old jeans. My filthy clothes stink of bug spray. I’m sweaty, sunburned, and thirsty. I’m happy.

And there’s the rub.

Happiness is Not Allowed. If it makes me happy, I shouldn’t be doing it. If it makes me happy, I shouldn’t get paid for it. The only truly productive way to live is to do what is not joyful. Happiness is selfish and lazy.

The first commandment of life is Make Yourself Useful. Happiness doesn’t come into it.

This internal voice has always been with me. I’m sure I wasn’t born with it, but when my memory starts the voice was already deeply rooted in my mind. The only things worth doing in life were repetitive, obligatory, dutiful activities. Responsibilities. Bonus points if the tasks were in service to someone else. An activity done for personal pleasure was a threat, a disobedience, a terrible betrayal.

Other people in my world were not happy; therefore, I had no right to be. Ever.

I recognize the lies, the rebellion and resentment, and the sinking heart accompanying this twisted belief. I know where the belief comes from. But still, still it triggers painful, cringing shame.

Yet I continue to snatch what hours I can to be in the garden. As I work, I think about my shame, the sadness of people who cannot allow themselves or anyone around them to be happy, and all the ways this particular belief has limited and inhibited me. So many of my passions are muted and hidden in the privacy of my own heart: Dance, writing, gardening, swimming. Oh, people know they’re activities I enjoy, but I hide my absolute, blazing passion for them behind a casual demeanor. Because I’m ashamed.

We have a corner lot, so a comparatively large garden space. I frequently clear patches of earth that lie bare under the sky, soaking in rain, sunshine, and receiving whatever seeds come. Sometimes it’s weeks before I get back to that same little patch, and I’m always delighted and surprised by how quickly new things come to grow wherever I’ve made a clearing. Some would call it all weeds. I call it life.

I’ve been thinking about the hard, muddy work of clearing, walking away, and then the miraculous return of life while we’re looking in another direction. I came across an article recently entitled “We are Defined by the Things We Don’t Do.” I’ve been thinking about that, too. Am I defined more by my choice to garden during a sunny afternoon or the fact that I didn’t clean the kitchen?

My hours in the garden, in the pool, dancing, writing, clear the ground of my being. Into that cleared ground come words, inspiration, delight, peace, rest, freedom. Without those hours to nurture and refresh me, my soil would grow hard and compacted, unreceptive and sterile. I cannot sustain myself with an endless round of housework and taking care of business. It’s not enough. No amount of efficient, effective housework gives me the joy I feel in the garden, or in typing words onto the page.

In short, my understanding of what it means to be “productive” does not make me happy or healthy.

So, what does it say about me as a person that my joy comes from such “selfish” and “lazy” activities? What kind of a terrible person chooses to grub in the garden rather than do the dishes and emotionally labor for others? What kind of a terrible person accepts payment for doing her heart’s delight?

A person like me, readers. A person like me.

I read a lot about mindfulness. I practice it in many different ways. It occurs to me, however, that my best moments and hours are spent mindlessly. The rhythm of swimming. The wordless seduction of music liberating me into dance. The sweat and texture and smell of working in the garden, the feel of the tools in my hands, the itch of a mosquito bite, the sear of sunlight on the tender skin at the nape of my neck. I’m not thinking. I’m not planning. I’m not trying or worrying. I just am. I have truly disappeared into the garden. And in that cleared ground of being the rest of my life, the necessary, the daily, the trivial things like wiping the counters and making the bed, are deeply rooted.

It’s in mindlessness that I find mindfulness. Mindlessness is a cleared patch of earth, dark, moist, rumpled, with seeds and roots and microbes and insects hidden below and the sky above. What will come to grow and live in that space? What will I weed out, and what will I nurture? What gifts, what treasures will come into the ground I have cleared?

The answers to those questions are none of my business now. The ground is cleared. Now I walk away, look in another direction, clear a patch on another side of the house, under the magnolia, maybe, or alongside the old well. Rain will come, and sun. Birds will come, insects. Roots and seeds. I will go inside, scrub the first layer of dirt out from under my nails, off my skin and cuticles. I’ll strip down and wipe insect repellent and sweat from my skin, treat bug bites. I’ll rehydrate, change into clean clothes. I’ll feel the tension between my pleasure in my outside work and the shame and reproach of the undone inside work.

And somewhere, when the time is right in some future moment, I’ll go back to the memory of that patch of earth, still chilly from winter when I cleared it, now thick with new life that crept in when I wasn’t looking, and I’ll find meaning and mindfulness. I’ll find creative inspiration. I’ll find words and peace and clarity.

I’ll find joy.

Questions:

• Where do you do your most joyful work?
• How successful do you feel at balancing the necessities of your life with private pleasure right now, today?
• Do you have an active, nasty, mean-minded internal critic? How do you shut that voice up? Do you recognize the voice as belonging to some person in your life?

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