It’s spitting snow in the Ohio River Valley this early March day. Cloudy gray skies threaten to add weight to my already heavy heart. What the coronavirus might mean for my country, my friends and family is also spitting a little inner precipitation on my spirit. With clorox wipes and hand sanitizer, I feel the weight of being in possible harm’s way. Both my husband and I fall into the senior age category, and he is compromised with asthma. I am somewhere in between the continuum of listening to news reports about what we know and don’t know and looking for relief elsewhere. Repeatedly washing our own hands, avoiding human contact, and staying away from large crowds is prudent advice, and equally as important--- being very aware of what we feel and think, as it does shape our reality. Keeping fear at bay as much as possible. But how do we deal with yet another calamity, another global crisis? Where outside of home, does it feel safe?
For me, it is a spring clean up in the garden, and long walks in the woods. The kind of day that makes you feel young and vital, hope stirring deep in your bones. Just yesterday outside my own front door, I found the opposite of winter, a healing balm of a lovely, warm spring day.
A magnolia tree was in bloom and swollen forsythia buds were just beginning to open to gold, two or three weeks before their usual emerging. It was heady stuff. So for even more pleasure afterwards, I drove to my neighborhood greenhouse. It was brimming with new life, pansies galore. The word pansy means “hearts-ease”. I had come to the right place. Soothing is exactly what is needed right now.
An enthusiastic woman was buying a huge amount of pansies. Her green light buttons were blinking in the GO position. She was purchasing flowers for her church containers. I asked her if she had a place at home to protect the new plants, a garage with sunny windows--- maybe before they were planted? It was going down to the twenties this weekend. She was astonished, had not thought to check the weather, did not know that flowering may be stunted when green life is not “hardened off” properly in the spring, which means gradually allowing plants to get used to temperature changes and wind. Annuals forced outside too soon without protection may refuse to bloom afterwards.
So my new acquaintance and I chatted. She was grateful for some advice. Sometimes, it is better to let the greenhouse do its job, and just wait awhile. So we savored a new friendship. And the thought that if folks were venturing out to go to her church, they would soon be greeted by such happy pansy faces was a comfort to me too.
I could worry that the new blooms I saw on my walk would be ruined. That the flowers would be spoiled and burned from this weekend’s cold. And that the strange weather patterns we are experiencing as temperatures rise above normal and crash below normal in greater frequency will only bring more calamity to our flower and food supply, our bees, our whole ecosystem. Or I could simply enjoy this very moment. That I was out here to witness what many others do not even notice or value. Yes, there is a great deal we cannot control, we might not even be able to protect our loved ones and ourselves, our gardens. But I know this to be true. Where I can protect and nurture, I will do it. I will keep planting, keep looking for signs of life, continue to seek the soothing rhythms of nature when I can find them. That is the gift of the garden right now, as spiritual and real metaphors abound there.
Some believe that by simply touching the earth, or digging into the soil, or even lying on the ground, you are enabling a powerful source of healing to enter into your body. There is a wondrous yogic practice I have learned of imagining that I am fusing with the earth by lying on my mat on my back, each side and then front of my body. Here in the silence, I use my breath to allow anything that is refuse, or illness, or fear to fall away into the arms of the Great Mother where it can be safely composted and changed back into something good. God imbued breath doing its own spring house cleaning!
When it warms up again, I will be planting kale, lettuce, spinach and arugula seeds. Eating fresh greens when we might be asked to remain at home. Delighting in tiny violas and pansy faces. All of that ‘“green energy”--- the clean air plants provide--- filling me up, when fear threatens to take us down.
May we all find our ways to a practice of “hearts-ease” during these difficult days. Namaste.
