My Most Remarkable Amazing Month of May 2020

Today, as I write this, it is June 1, 2020. I promised myself that I would quit my May gardening immersion and begin to concentrate on all the writing projects that are now demanding my attention. However, I realize that as much as I am a gardener at heart, I have never, in my whole adult life, had an entire spring month to completely concentrate on bringing the blooming panoply of sprouting, growing things into a greening order.

Last year, I suffered from an eating dysphasia, and all the years before that, we were traveling, organizing listening groups, hosting guests and visitors, producing broadcasts and telecasts, meeting writing deadlines—there simply wasn’t time enough in any month to bring the gardens and wooded easements on either side of our property into shape.

This month, thanks to the isolation enforced upon this nation because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have had the time. No place to go. Nowhere I have to be but home. No friends coming for Bible studies or small groups or dinners. Being 84 (David) and 77 (Karen), we didn’t even make the effort to stream our church’s worship services. Talk about the gift of time.

So every day, for a month, for a whole month, I approached the yard with shovel and clippers and the contents of my rolling gardening cart and a determined mindset to transform all the neglect that has contributed to the unruly weed and plant insurrection. My goal is to turn the horticultural anarchy into that always longed-for state of being—consanguinity. Consanguinity occurs when humans or nature coexist in peaceful harmony. Consanguinity is often the unnamed longing of the deepest part of human nature. We want peace. We want beauty. We want to build trust and a “helping-one-another” co-existence. Well-loved gardens are always a picture to the starving human eye, and a salve to the unsettled human soul of what can be and of what, with some dedicated labor, can be.

David actually said to me one day after I had washed off the mud and fixed my hair and donned fresh-from-the-washing-machine duds, “Oh! Nice to see you clean.”

It’s a truism: You can’t pull a garden into shape without getting dirty. You can’t plant and transplant nursery purchases into the soil without soiling your hands. You can’t dig and divide too-large plants, nor haul out weeds without becoming covered with mud. Sweat is your co-partner. This is the nature of creating consanguinity. We are often covered with the muck we seek to vanquish.

Each week in May, I wrote on Facebook about a God-hunt sighting. Going on the God Hunt is the best way I know of vanquishing all the ills (and I do mean ALL the ills) that can haunt us during these unsettling times. The fear of illness: Will someone we love contract the coronavirus and die a lonely death in some hospital ward? The fear of economic collapse: How without work and income will we be able to pay the rent, the mortgage, feed our loved ones and help our friends? The fear of an unending pandemic: What if we just recycle from one new virus to another and a vaccine is not discovered to halt this infectious spread? The fear now of riots and anarchy spreading through our land: How will we halt this other spreading infection of rage and lawlessness?

We go on the daily God Hunt. We seek to notice how God is working on our behalf day after day, hour after hour. We also make deliberations: Frequently, God doesn’t answer our prayers until the last moment. Faith-building exercise? Often, the way He shows us His love involves a great deal of humor! We find ourselves laughing at His last minute-rescue pranks.

And so I spent one whole month, the month of the remarkable, glorious, amazing May, being awed by His exquisite design capabilities in each plant—in the rose bushes I am nurturing, in the new herb garden I designed and planted, in the lessons that lurk in creating compost for amending the clay soil that often frustrates me. Like God, I compost everything. Nothing is wasted. Dig those kitchen scraps into the soil. Mix in the brown stuff—keep a pile of fall leaves in the woods as amendments for nurturing vital flowerbeds.

So by the end of May, the gardens were beginning to look like gardens should. My bones were stronger. My sleep each night was deep.

And now, I am planning garden parties, COVID-19 outside committee meetings, driveway potlucks with lawn chairs placed the appropriate distance from each other. There are ways to get around all this isolation. Muddy May has passed; I have June and the rest of the summer to leverage some solutions that will bring folk safely together.

Consanguinity. Consanguinity. Consanguinity.

Karen Mains

Reminder!

The Soulish Food e-mails are being posted biweekly on the Hungry Souls Web site. Newcomers can look that over and decide if they want to register on the Web site to receive the biweekly newsletter. You might want to recommend this to friends also. They can go to www.HungrySouls.org.

Hungry Souls Contact Information

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Karen Mains

BOOK CORNER

The Village Effect:
How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier
by Susan Pinker

This book has convinced me of what I already know. In the age of Internet technology, ZOOM calls and COVID-19 isolation, face-to-face meetings are more important than ever. For those of you who are concerned with the psychological and emotional impacts of national social isolation, or if you are concerned about the projected increase in suicides due to these unsettling days, this is the book to read. The Holy Spirit is certainly capable of giving us the answers and creative ideas as how to leverage these times into actions and activities that bring Him glory. Let’s inspire one another. What are you doing to combat isolation “face-to-face”?

From the back-cover copy: "Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge many of our assumptions. Most of us have left the literal village behind, and don’t want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive—even to survive."

I’m looking for quirky gentle movies that deal with the impact of face-to-face relationships. These are not “message” films, but those that, almost off-handedly, reveal this truth: We need one another to be whole.

The first of hopefully many: Winter’s Bone