by David Wann
Growing vegetables and fruits taught me the value of filling time with something that feels right. I’d spend Saturday planting vegetables and digging a new plot in the crazy quilt I called a garden; then Sunday morning, I’d just want to do more of the same. Getting so much exercise and good food taught me what it felt like to feel great, and I wanted more of that feeling. (My then-wife customized a T-shirt for me that read “Mr. Vigor,” which I wore proudly as I ate organic broccoli or battled slugs and hailstones.)
I learned what a passion is about—something you did whether or not it seemed like a good idea to others. I noticed, though, that people would tour my little garden and comment on how much work it must be; then the next year, they’d call with questions about how to start their own gardens. It’s not that we gardeners are trying to be “old fashioned” or unsocial with our time, more that we are reviving a skill we can take with us into the future—a pastime that doesn’t cost money but saves it, while also delivering wide-ranging health and environmental benefits. If I eat a sweet pepper or a handful of raspberries as I work, I can count on an energy boost that lasts for hours, because that food is still charged with life as I’m eating it. Rather than traveling an average 2,000 miles to my mouth, it’s more like two feet. The fuel savings are huge. The food that comes from my garden also doesn’t require pesticides, but rather skill—again, a great energy-saver and environmental bonus. Gardens create habitats, absorb storm water to reduce flooding, and give us something to take care of—a basic, primordial human need.
In the book The Zen of Gardening, I wrote, “In the garden, life’s struggles, snags and snafus decompose into rich, black earth. I see and feel things happening—things that are real, not just white-knuckle policies and commercial blabber. As I plant seedlings or hoe a sturdy crop of basil, I don’t think about operators who are ‘currently busy helping other customers. ’ I can touch, smell, see, and taste where I live; I know about Golden, Colorado, partly by making horticultural deals with it. I learn what it can provide and what I can coax from it, as my knowledge and skill continue to expand. In the garden, life and death dance before my eyes every day, and I come to a better understanding of my own health and mortality. The garden literally brings me back to my senses.”
When the garden becomes a lifestyle, we begin to rethink where we spend our time, energy, and money. We go out to eat less, partly because what comes out of the garden is vastly superior to what comes out of a typical restaurant’s kitchen, and partly because we just want to keep working in the strawberry bed or planting the broccoli seedlings. It occurs to us in a flash of insight that time isn’t money—it’s life.
So consider these passages to be an uncommercial for gardening. Turn off the tube and take a few gardening classes. Start small, with a raised bed or two. I guarantee you’ll like it, or “double your time back.”
Although nighttime temperatures often fall below freezing in the Harmony cold frame, baby lettuce plants announce, “No worries.” Courtesy of the author
The Nature of Heaven: Adventures in the Great Beyond
One of the many people Richard Louv interviewed for Last Child in the Woods was a twelve-year-old girl who commented, “I really think there is something about nature—that when you are in it, you realize that there are far larger things at work than yourself.” I know what that girl meant. I remember a suddenly-spring day at Hampstead Heath in London (where I was an exchange student), wading barefoot in a shallow stream, mud squishing between my toes. Although my learned reaction to the squishiness was, “yichh,” I realized in a flash of insight that mud isn’t really dirty—in a sense, it’s the essence of clean—the place where life originally came from and where it ends up. What I hold sacred is life itself, and that includes even the life that teems in soil and squishy mud. The incredible beauty and complexity of living things assures me that everything’s all right; that I’m part of something that goes on and on. There’s no need for fear, and no need to hurry.
I do have a strong suspicion that there’s an afterlife, but I’m not convinced we each carry personal identities with us up some cosmic escalator like beat-up pieces of luggage. Instead, what I think may happen is that after a transition period at the Pearly Gates (while our luggage is inspected and gratefully acknowledged), departing souls melt back to a wavelength that courses through all of life. And I strongly believe that if Heaven in whatever form does exist, it’s not just a comforting, unknowable fable, it’s biology and physics. If it’s made out of reality rather than fiction, we should be able to make contact with it, with all our expanding, awesome technologies, from spectroscopy and astronomy to magnetic resonance imaging.
Ten Rules of Thumb for Those Seduced by Gardening
1. Go easy on yourself. Gardening is best practiced without shame, doubt, regret, envy, or dread. The only good garden is a no-guilt garden. As Diane Ackerman says, “Weeding can attain the status of a holy war. My philosophy is: Forget winning, cultivate delight.” Just as we leave our muddy boots at the back door, we need to leave stress and guilt at the garden gate. Any garden that yields knowledge, health, and no-worries recreation deserves a shot at something less than perfection.
2. Garden strategically, just for fun. Rather than single crops, grow recipes! As you stretch across multicolored rows of lettuce to weed the icicle radishes, think tossed salad. Prepare the soil for pie, not just strawberries and rhubarb. You can even set target dates for serving the recipes, such as roasting red, white, and blue new potatoes for the Fourth of July; midsummer night’s pesto; or strategically planted salsa for autumn football parties.
3. If at first you don’t succeed, keep planting. Wipe the slate clean by burying the evidence or hauling it to the compost pile. Your Brussels sprouts may be covered with aphids from stem to stern, but nobody needs to know that. The spinach looks anemic? Now you see it, now you don’t.
4. Garden with all your senses. You may not be able to see a billion microbes in a handful of soil, or smell subtle chemical messages constantly being sent from plant to plant, but you can see a glow on the leaves of a healthy stand of chard. You can smell the richness of a well-rotted bucket of compost, taste the season’s first crunchy snow peas, feel the feathery leaves of an asparagus plant, and hear the leaves of an apple tree rustling in an autumn breeze.
5. Harvest the intangibles. This may be the most important rule of all. It’s not just food we’re after, but knowledge, serenity, and a sense of purpose. Remember, what gardens do best is help gardeners grow.
6. Fertilize the soil, not just the plant. Gardens aren’t factories, they’re ecosystems that are constantly at work. Mulching a tired-looking crop with rich compost brings health not only to that current crop, but also to the surrounding soil and therefore the crop that follows it—to the system as a whole.
7. Never make the same mistake twice. (In my case, never make it more than half a dozen times.) As insurance against repetitious errors, keep a logbook. Or at least tell your spouse or gardening colleague about the initial mistake, so if you do it again (and again), you can blame it on them.
8. Remember that gardening is a race we should never expect to really win. We can appear to be in the lead from time to time, however—if we’re willing to neglect the housekeeping, our career, and our personal hygiene.
9. Remember that the best garden ever is always in the future. Garden for the years to come as well as the present. Build next year’s soil, nurture the roots of trees and perennials for future years.
10. Watch the gardens of your neighbors. Pay particular attention to the older folks to find out what grows best in your neighborhood. Kneeling in lush, handcrafted beds, they leave paving stones behind themselves so the rest of us can find the way.
Adapted from The Zen of Gardening by David Wann (Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 2003).
Just for the fun of it, let’s say we do retain our identities in Heaven. One day as you listen to the car radio, you pick up a staticky message from some decease
d air traffic controller trying to get in touch with his daughter. As the frequency gets sharper and reaches listeners from Delaware to Darfur, there’s great rejoicing on Earth! Holy wars cease when we learn that all of life—and death—are governed by natural law that treats everyone equally. But then (this is the cynic in me and in many of us), I’m imagining that some of the more enterprising folks here on Earth might see a huge new market opportunity. “Even you angels will be much more blissful if you have communication links with family members you’ve left behind, won’t you?” they coax. “Won’t videos from home make you feel more secure about your reputation back on Earth … ?” These masters of public relations will make even angels feel insecure, and, in the end, Microsoft and AOL, Wal-Mart and Target will trade digital uploads for heavenly balls of energy.
The fact is, we don’t know the nature of that other side, or other frequency. Sometimes I wonder if our brains have learned to filter it out (despite vivid glimpses during near-death experiences) because it’s not critical for dealing with more immediate survival issues here on Earth, like saber-toothed tigers and broken fuel pumps.
But we do know that nature is fundamental to our survival, and that it needs our help, now. Standing in my galoshes and shorts in that Costa Rican rain forest, I was completely amazed; completely in the moment. A shiny blue dragonfly with a body about the size of a clothespin decided to orbit my head three or four times, showcasing its remarkably shiny, helicopter-like wings. By that time, I’d become completely open to everything the rain forest had to offer. At least temporarily, I’d gained a wider, more holistic sense of self. “I” was not enclosed by my skin, but extended out into the infinitely patterned rain forest and beyond. I remember thinking as the dragonfly hovered comically around my head, “That’s me, saying hello to myself!”
9
Precious Work and Play
Going with the Flow
I once gave a talk at an elementary school to third graders, and told them there are a billion people in the world who want to work and can’t work. A girl raised her hand and asked, “Is all the work done?”
—Paul Hawken
The point of life is not to slave away for years until the age of 65 and then say, “Phew, Glad that’s over!” Rather it is to make sure that we do not die with our music still in us.
—Lance Secretan
It’s impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.
—Jerome K. Jerome
There was bad news and good news for Michael Penkala, who had camped in line for two days to buy the newly released Sony Playstation3. The bad news was that he had to be taken to a hospital with gunshot wounds after two thieves held him up while he was waiting. The good news? Wal-Mart publicly announced he’d receive a free Playstation3 as soon as one became available. Woo-hoo! At hundreds of Best Buys, Wal-Marts, and GameStop stores all over the country, the release date was a violent video game come-to-life. For example, in Connecticut, a buyer walked triumphantly out of a store with a new PS3 that five masked men promptly made off with. In Kentucky, a passing car opened fire on buyers waiting in line; and in California, two GameStop employees reported a fake robbery to cover up their own theft. The list goes on and on; stampedes and near riots broke out all over the country—police fired pepper pellets at unruly shoppers, and multiple stabbings occurred just like in the games.1
Let’s hope the new console is somehow worth all the pain and police time! I suppose I should suspend judgment until I sit down with one of the games (not likely)—but the PS3 frenzy tells us one thing: Millions of Americans are willing, as always, to take risks to PLAY. There’s further evidence of that in Cleveland, where resolute, wet-suited surfers challenge the murky waters of Lake Erie, even in the dead of winter. Writes a New York Times reporter, “Cleveland largely turns its back on Lake Erie, lining the coast with power plants, a freeway and mounds of iron ore to feed its steel factories. The shore is especially deserted in winter, when strong winds and waves pummel the land.” Clearly, somebody had to put those polluted waves to good use, and forty-four-year-old Bill Weeber, known as Mongo, stepped forward with his surfboard and companions. “Surfing Lake Erie is basically disgusting,” he admits, “but then I catch that wave and I forget about it, and I feel high all day.”2
As author and adventurer Diane Ackerman observes, play can be much more than diversion. Humans as well as most other animals evolved not only through war games but courtship games, socializing games, hunting games, and games that sharpen the senses. The more an animal needs to learn to survive, the more he needs to play, she maintains. Who knows what skills crows learn when they play tugs of war with twigs? Maybe it’s just for sheer enjoyment, which also has survival value. Says Ackerman, “A crow may swing upside down on a branch, monkey style, or play drop the stick—flying down fast to catch it. One researcher saw a crow invent a log-rolling game in which it balanced on a plastic cup and rolled it down a hill.”3 (An oversized version of that game might just work on the TV show Fear Factor, if it was filled with rattlesnakes.)
“Play is a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods, and decrees,” writes Ackerman. “The playground can be as big as the Grand Canyon, as fluid as the ocean where dolphins swim, as crowded as a jazz club.”4 For my talented friend Phil Lohre, a Colorado or Alpine ski slope is the perfect playground. “Being at the top of a ridge with the sun setting and fresh powder below is totally exhilarating,” he says with a smile that reveals many memories. “On the way down you experience a freedom of openness, a feeling of great challenge, and occasionally, a heroic wipeout that sprays your equipment all over the hill. But most of the time, you look back up and say, Wow, those are my tracks? I did that?”5
Phil’s passion for skiing spans thirty years or more. In fact, in his twenties, he considered competing professionally on the freestyle mogul circuit, but an appointment with the Foreign Service popped up first. He got hooked on skiing in his teenage years. “At that age, you go as fast as you can until you fall down,” he recalls with a laugh. “Your speed gets away from you, you catch a tip, and the next thing you know you’re cartwheeling down the hill. But one day I was skiing at full speed, to the point where I usually crashed, and I didn’t crash. I realized that I’d jumped to a new level of proficiency, and that’s what I’d been working for.”
In each of the sports Phil has played competitively—including hockey, basketball, softball, soccer, and Ultimate Frisbee (now known widely as “Ultimate”)—the game is the center of the universe while it’s being played. “Going onto the field, you enter a sacred space. You can leave all your worldly anxieties behind and just be totally immersed in the game. Whatever you’ve done in the past is irrelevant; the present is what counts. You feel a sense of urgency as you work intently with your teammates to execute strategies and tactics, because time is always a factor.” One of Phil’s favorite feelings is the satisfied exhaustion that follows a game. “When the game’s over and you’ve given it everything you have, you come away with memories, experiences, and a deeper camaraderie. You feel high as a kite.”
Phil has played Ultimate for twenty-five years and been a key member on various championship teams. In 2000, his team went to Germany as U.S. national champions. “I remember looking down the line at my six teammates and thinking, ‘solid, solid, solid …’ Our sense of confidence and teamwork was awesome, and the sense of fitting and belonging was something I’ll never forget.” His team won the world championship that year, and then went to the semifinals four years in a row. But despite the thrill of winning, it’s the playing that really does it for him—those transcendent moments when he loses himself in the game. Winning may be the frosting on a cake made from ingredients like skill, focus, fun, and teamwork, but when opponents and tea
mmates want only the frosting, Phil becomes less interested. In fact, he first became involved in Ultimate because of its informality and emphasis on the joys of playing. “There was no coach barking at us; we coached ourselves. The idea was to play hard, have fun, and get to know each other. Sometimes, I think we all take winning too seriously, at the expense of enjoyment.”
Now, as a high school coach in various sports (as well as a teacher of academic subjects), he emphasizes teamwork. “My goal is to give them tools so they can work together and improve together. Instead of throwing the disc to the star player all the time, I encourage them to throw it to whoever’s open so they all learn new skills, build confidence, and have fun as a team.”
“The Peak Justifies the Climb”
Certainly, we make the effort to climb, fish, or play Ultimate partly because of a potential prize—reaching the peak, pulling out a five-pound trout, or scoring the winning point. But the real reward—available to amateurs as well as masters—is that we’re out there, interacting with others and challenging ourselves to reach our highest potential. When we watch sports on TV, the biggest challenge may be whether we’ll personally polish off a whole pizza. We aren’t using our senses; we’re not risking exciting, high-payoff strategies; we’re not getting the ball to a pumped-up teammate who’s ready to do something with it. We don’t receive the rewards of physical conditioning and we’re often clueless about the intricacies of the game. By default, what we’re left with is whether our favorite team wins or loses. Residents of Ashbourne, England, still stage an annual match of “mob football,” a spirited forerunner of soccer and football, played for at least seven hundred years. Anyone willing to risk getting trampled is welcome to play. Traditionally, the game started at a midway point between two towns. Players tried to kick, carry, or throw an inflated pig’s bladder to a goal marker in the opposing town, and no doubt there was much merriment afterward, in the pubs of both the winning and losing teams.6