Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Jeff Gill

 

Going back, looking forward

___

 

Weeding in my flower beds is a useful exercise both for the look of the landscaping, and for the good of my body, maybe even my soul.

 

You can't be detached or disinterested and do a good job weeding. You have to be on your hands and knees, up close and personal, and your fingers generally need to dig into the soil.

 

Yeah, there are tools. Every year there are ads for products that you can use standing up, on a long handle, letting you weed or till or poke at the earth from your lofty five or six feet elevation. And they generally don't work other than in a transitory, surface level fashion. You gotta get the roots, and to do that you gotta get down.

 

From which vantage point you see things differently, of course. The ground now inches from your face, and the world around you when you look up, pause and take a breath. Even the cool of April allows a gardener to work up a sweat if they are pulling and cutting and hauling.

 

For a moment, weeding around a sturdy stand of daffodils, I looked up just a bit, glancing away from sprouting dandelion sprays of toothed leaves flat on the ground, and looked into the heart of those spring flowers.

 

Perhaps it's because I'd recently spent three days on retreat in a place where I sat often in an old stone cathedral, but there right in front of me was a glowing hallway of green pillars, a space defined within the cluster of daffodil stems, the soil level, the verdant uprights all around a shadowed but well lit space, the glow from above filtered through the yellow blossoms.

 

That space within was both small – perhaps six inches high and about that in diameter, but it felt in a rush like a vast space for a tiny occupant. It's a feeling not unusual for a child, kneeling on the sidewalk looking at an ant in a crack, strolling like a city dweller between the buildings, or if you're poking at a stone or log and when it rolls over, seeing the complex community of bugs and worms and beetles suddenly in motion, and you can almost glimpse what that looks like the other way round, with you as the giant, but the scurrying occupants of underneath the normal sized ones.

 

I saw myself, for a moment, standing in that span of half a foot, but marveling at looking up into the golden light above, and surrounded by vibrant green pillars all around me. For that moment, I could project myself into that reality, not quite virtual, but not what I actually am, either.

 

And then I went back to weeding. That's what grown-ups do, after all. But the moment has stuck with me.

 

No matter our age, if you get out into nature, if you look at small details, if you can change your frame of reference, you can go almost anywhere. To the edge of an event horizon and back, into the background of an ancient oil painting among the cast of characters, down into burrows in the ground or up the bark of a tree.

 

Children do this easily if we let them. If you're older, it takes a little more attention, but it's worth the effort. Because it changes how you see the work ahead, and the work has to get done.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's still got more weeding to do. Tell him about something small that made a big change in perspective at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.