Tending
August’s heat has loosened its grip, and September is coming off the river in sweet wafts. You can even see it in the way the hawks circle today, livelier than they’ve been since May. A perfect day for gardening. Yet, I know I will not step foot into the garden. I won’t even press one tiny seed into the trays already filled with soil and waiting.
Early this morning, before the sun has crested the riverbank, I walked the dog on the dusty path. Rabbits and turkey scattering ahead of us at the mere sound of the dog’s huffing breath, trying to take in every smell at once. Unquenchable.
The path opens out into field that eventually tumbles into river, goes off wherever the river goes. At first, at the field my mind thinks blank space. But I’m wrong. Not a square inch of this place is bare. Kneeling to pull a leaf covered in aphid honeydew stuck to the dog’s paw, I see that even what looks to be bare dirt holds a small flowering plant reaching its thread-thin tendrils toward the path’s edge. Ants edge the cracks in the dried clay. A thin pink fuzz that does not seem to rely on water clings to the edge of the path. Coyote fur clings at the base of the golden grasses. The sky itself holds all the elements that make up air, geese, airplane, dust from halfway across the globe, smoke particles from the fires further south.
Suddenly I am in a miraculously and newly full place, amongst the grasses and weeds I cannot name. The abundance is a buoy, a way to keep my head above the water of exhaustion that sometimes takes hold in a body like mine.
Emptiness does not truly exist; every space is full of some other thing.
When I feel I have done nothing today, it isn’t true. It isn’t empty. Today is an interstitial space, a gap between larger systems. Without it, the whole thing would collapse.
Today, I must tend only the body. I will watch from my chair as the nut grass spreads and the bindweed twines itself into the salvia. I will watch as the butternut squash hardens and the one perfect zucchini grows larger than a forearm. I will stay alert to the hummingbirds gathering what they need from the zinnia patch. I will let the ache of my body be the ache of my body. And I will tend it.
