Orange blossom intoxication begins and I, yet again, deepen my practice of going more slowly, surrendering into where/how the energy moves me as I work in my container garden.
It’s an extraordinarily glorious morning, this second day of spring. Brilliant blue skies, fine wisps of cloud high over the mountains, three playful red-tail hawks calling to each other as they float their lazy spirals in the sky. Two crows fly with them–nattering, teasing and heckling as only crows can. Warm winds from the east dance through all my wind chimes and bells, offering counterpoint.
I notice as I wander through my side yards filling birdfeeders, that tiny, tender pale green leaves are beginning to slip out of their fat buds on the huge sycamores just outside my door. The quail, house finch, white-crested sparrows, juncos, jays, mourning dove, tufted titmice, robins, towhees, crows and other birds I can’t identify are having particularly lively, delightfully engaging brunch conversation all around the cottage.
Each morning, floating in my hot tub doing my Reiki hands-on meditation, I watch the slow cycle of the orange trees coming into bud. First tiny bright green baubles appear. Slowly they seem to inflate, gradually lightening into creamy white puffs that daily grow fatter still. And, just today, the first of these pregnant white buds have begun to fall open, to release their extravagantly voluptuous scent! The season of fragrant, erotic, aromatic intoxication is upon us in Ojai!
This orchard is slower to blossom than some. One of the trails I walk at sunset is, part of the way, bordered by a hillside grove that’s been wild with scent for the past ten days. When the days are as warm as they’ve been these past two weeks, the orange oils evaporate in the heat. It’s only toward sundown (when I’m moved to walk) that the waves of scent gather to knock one over with their intensity!
I continue to drift in threshold space–no direction, nothing calling me forth from this resting cycle in my own life. Three of my dearest friends, though, are in the middle of enormous turning times in their lives. So, in this open space in my own life, I’ve been into what my friend Carol calls “adjunct mode.” Since two of the three live at some considerable distance, I do this mostly by phone. I’ve been hanging out with each of these amazing women bearing witness, being personal cheering squad and vicariously living through every step along their way with them. In sharing their journeys, I too am transformed by the experiencing. And, it’s much easier going through these experiences vicariously: I get to take breaks from the intensity!
The lessons of going slowly, surrendering completely into when, how and where the energy moves me–both of these continue to be in the very center of my days.
Over the month I’ve also been repotting my entire container garden. Some 20-odd rose and other bushes whose wooden and terracotta containers deteriorate and need replacing every 7 or 8 years. For most of the years of my gardening life, and certainly the last time I did this, I’ve seemed led to garden till I dropped. I’d start early in the day spending incredibly long hours totally immersed and totally smeared with earth. Often I would end the day up to my armpits in soil, with a flashlight in my teeth or with the moon being my light. Sometimes there’d be days and days of this in a row.
This year (when I am 61) it all unfolds so differently. The pots and soils sit for days before it becomes clear it’s time to start the process. Then I seem to meander through my morning before it feels like time for me to begin. I do only 2 or 3 pots in one day. A day or two passes before I’m brought back to the gardening again. For a while it seems I will hire a helper, at least for the roses. I always wind up scratched to bits when I repot them and that doesn’t feel right this time around. But, the helper falls through and it becomes clear that I’m to do them myself, but differently from how I’ve done them before. Again days pass before I begin with the roses. I do just 2 or 3 a day.
There is so much delight in the process of repotting my plants. Nothing becomes “waste.” The aluminum bands I cut from around the barrels go into the recycling bin. The weathered staves I stack in my woodpile to be used for kindling. I, up-to-my-elbows, hand mix all organic components: potting soil, composted barnyard manure and flower/rose fertilizer in a great wheelbarrow from which I fill the new containers. I gently lift each of the bushes from the base of the now dismantled barrel and begin the incredibly intimate, sensuous process of tenderly massaging the old soil from its root ball. The old soil is full of worms and other soil enriching creatures, so I save it on a tarp and then lovingly repack this still rich, familiar soil around the plant once it is resting in its new home.
Everything happens in slow motion. I’m led to take many breaks. I watch and wonder at all of the newness in this process. It surprises me that I am not uncomfortable with the changes. The old me would have been. She seemed to need to come to closure with projects in ways that this me no longer seems to need. This me is being helped to put projects down in the middle of them, to be able to completely let go of them for a time even though they’re not completely done. I can even rest in the middle of the incompleteness, as long as I make order of the supplies and tools before I stop each time.
This way is so much easier on my body! My aging body is so much happier to not do so much at once, to have days to regroup between spurts of big work! What’s so amazing is that it comes so naturally to be slowing down, to be more gentle, less demanding of this body that no longer has the forgiveness for overwork that my younger bodies have had. It’s also wonderful to let go of the ruminations (mostly!) that have always accompanied any times of stopping-in-the-middle of things earlier on in my journey.
It’s still sometimes a little challenging for me to rest easy with the circuitous meanderings that the energy leads me through as I travel through a day. This is so mostly when it begins to seem that there’ll be no space/time left or a hike or walk. Some part of me gets cranky, feels “interfered with.” Still, cranky or not, I do surrender into staying with wherever the energy seems to be leading me. Surrendering doesn’t ever require that I be happy about it, just that I do surrender!
And then, when I do surrender, I’m rewarded by, as Anne Lamott describes it, “[Spirit] showing off for me!” After feeling very crabby the other day about not seeming to be able to get off the property/out of the house for hours, I finally left for the trail around 4 o’clock with a rain poncho and backpack. I was going up to gather windfall avocados in the mountains. (It was the day after some very high winds.) The sky was fierce, dark and threatening rain. Yet, some blue sunlit patches held the promise of a rainbow.
After I’d gather some 20 avocados and was heading back down from the mountain, a steady but gently pouring rain began at the same time that a full arc rainbow appeared! While I stopped to watch, it became a double rainbow: another reversed half arc appeared above it! I whooped with delight. This was only the second time in my life I’d seen a double rainbow. And then, yet another miracle: the first, full arc rainbow developed second layers of indigo, then blue and green repeating below its violet band! Two and a half rainbows!!!
Filled with awe and a soaring heart, I stood in the rain watching and knowing that this was the gift that came from listening and surrendering into Spirit’s /my deep self’s energy. Had I overridden that direction with some “agenda” my mind had for me, I’d never had been just there at just that precious moment to witness that spectacular miracle! I gave thanks and bowed.
Originally published in March 2002
