Eden was a garden

First I hoe.  The dirt beneath my bare feet bakes my soles, and a puff of dust coughs up around my ankles every step I take.  Above my head the pale blue sky rings with brightness.  Cooking in my own perspiration, I drag the hoe over the ground stroke after stroke after stroke, enjoying the feel of the earth cracking then crumbling then churning beneath it.  I enjoy the toughness of the task, the strain of it, the way it makes my heart pound a little, the way I can find a tempo to work within that silences my brain.  This brain-silence is no robotic mindlessness, but rather a vibrant clarity of purpose that focuses me so completely in each moment that all other concerns are eclipsed. 
When I finish hoeing the final row of corn I chuck the hoe over the garden fence and grab the handle of my weed bucket, my shoulders burning and my shirt drenched, a brilliance behind my eyeballs that aches.  After the driving beat of the hoe, the silence that enfolds me is a rich relief.  My heartbeat remembers its natural rhythm and as it calms I find my mind kindling awake. 

I love this part the most.  Hunkering on my heels, I inspect the first bean plant, grazing fingertips over the flowering sprouts, combing fingers up from the stem through the branching leaves, just feeling the shape and the texture of it.  I could almost weed by touch alone at this point, so familiar am I with the contours of my own plants, although I would never be so reckless.  Besides, I love to look at them as much as I love to touch them: their particular green coated with dust and sunshine, the dainty flowers adorning each ripening bunch.  I love the way the air espouses their scent when I touch them, love knowing that I’ve stirred to life the earthy fragrances that fill the air I’m breathing. 

After inspecting each plant, I clear the earth around them of weeds, filling my bucket several times over as I move from my bean rows into the luxuriant jungle of my tomato vines (bursting wildly out of their wire cages), and then the sprawl of my melons (lifting scratchy tendrils to drag up weeds from beneath them, correcting the path of the rambling ones that have sought sunshine in the corn or beyond the perimeter of my patch), and then my peppers (sighing over their blighted produce and wilting leaves), and finally the hardy potato bushes, the rows and rows of sturdy corn, already knee high.  I follow the same routine with each plant.  First attentive scrutiny.   Then the loosening of my mind as I pull weeds that leaves me room to note the bigger world:  distant traffic, children’s voices, insects jamboreeing, doors slamming, lawn mowers purring, even on occasion the crack of fireworks.
   
This is the summer I learned to love gardening: the blending of labor and languor, of concentration and abstraction, of sunshine and soil and sweat.  All five senses get their moment.  Mind and body are equally engaged. 

I would declare that I am--heart, mind, soul, and strength--the happiest creature on God’s green earth.