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| © Donna L. Watkins - Bluebird Cove Garden |
When I garden, earth and earthworm pass between my fingers and I realize that I am made of the same stuff. When I pinch the cucumber vine and the water drips from capillaries to soil, I can feel the blood coursing through my body.
Man is a microcosm in whose flesh resonates and reverberates the pulse of the whole creation, in whose mind creation comes to consciousness, and through whose imagination and will God wants to heal and reconcile everything that sin has wounded and put in disharmony.
Adam and Eve were placed in a garden where they walked together with God and did not need to garden. But when they sinned and were expelled, gardening began. Gardening symbolizes our race's primordial acceptance of a responsibility and role in rectifying the harm done to the creation through sin.
Adam and Eve were cast out from Paradise, but the memory of Paradise remains. So gardeners try to recreate Paradise in their own yards ... God gave us these growing things as signs and symbols of His redeeming love for the whole of creation.
Jesus prayed in a garden and agonized there, watering it with His tears. His body .. was also buried in a garden. Every garden is an intimation of the Garden that is Christ's that He himself tends in the hearts of those who welcome Him in.
In Oscar Wilde's story of "The Selfish Giant," he writes: "[The giant] did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting."
What a lovely thought to get us through the winter. The flowers are resting.
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