"Gardeners of the Spirit":
Something in us hungers to be reconnected to the Earth like Black Elk was. Something in us yearns to find the "living presence," to feel enveloped by it, empowered by it, loved by it. And maybe it's this very presence that calls us to be gardeners, but not just in outer gardens. We haven't really been talking this morning just about corn and tomatoes and dahlias and delphiniums. The outer garden is a symbol, a rich metphor for what it takes to care about something, to help it come alive and grow and flower, and then in the full circle to allow it to die. So you may not raise cauliflowers or roses, but if you have a spouse, you have a garden. If you have a child, you have a garden. If you have a friend that's unique to you in all the world, you have a garden. Anyone you care for is your garden. And each and every one of these gardens demands of you hard work, patience, trust, humility, dignity, and reverence.
But even if you were a hermit way up there in the Himalayas alone in your cave, this would still hold true because you'd be working in your inner garden. Consider this--you are not only the gardener; you are the garden. The power and the presence of which you are the servant when you love another is the very power and presence in your own heart, in the very soul of you, in the very soil of you. Think of it--you are the seed; you are the sprouting; you are the growing into fullness; and you aare the flowering. "A single immense miracle of a flower" is a line from one of May Sarton's poems. You yourself are a single immense miracle, and then after the flowering you are the dying. But from your death springs new life from a new seed, and the dance goes on.
