And so long as you haven't experienced
This: to die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.
— Goethe

---

What is our task here, on this living planet?

We ask it again and again.
We long to serve, to be ready,
to meet the unknown challenges
set before us.

Meditation, prayer, yoga, tai chi—
these open the channel
between self and Source.
But every practice needs grounding.
Energy is only useful
when a current meets the earth.
We are electric beings;
our circuitry depends on soil, on touch.

This is why I love to garden.
It keeps me honest.
It keeps me close to what sustains life.

When I press my hands into the dark loam,
I touch the feminine current—
the slow, intuitive pulse of knowing.
As Marion Woodman reminds us,
only the grounded body can hold the light.
Disembodied spirit shakes itself apart;
embodied light creates.

---

Spring returns, and we kneel again
before the great green mother.
After winter’s long confinement,
the invitation feels holy.
We compost what no longer serves,
till the ground, ready the seed.

Yet this year, as we kneel,
we might ask:
How deep is our relationship
to the soil itself?
Can tending the earth
also tend the soul?
Can healing our ground
heal the ground of being?

---

In the elemental wheel,
earth and water are Yin—feminine;
air and fire, Yang—masculine.
When we sink our hands in dirt,
we engage Yin directly:
the receptive, patient, listening field.

Without thought,
we may sense how to nurture the seed,
how to amend the soil,
how to care for what grows.
And in that same moment,
we might glimpse how to care
for ourselves.

Perhaps we reach for organic soil this time—
and realize the body, too,
is asking for purer nourishment.
The earth knows, and so do we,
when we pause to listen.

---

We are made of the same matter.
The same consciousness hums through us,
waiting to be awakened.
This knowing doesn’t answer to logic.
It whispers through the skin,
and when obeyed,
it heals.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés once wrote:

Women dig in the earth to find
the two-million-year-old woman,
her toes, her paws.
With her they feel of a piece,
and at peace.

She spoke of the Wild Woman—
the earthy feminine alive in us all.
Her paws still press the soil.

---

The feminine has been buried
beneath industry’s steel and speed,
and now the Earth herself strains
under our forgetting.
Body and planet mirror each other:
matter, mater, mother.

Woodman again reminds us:

We were given the body for a reason.
If you keep trying to escape it,
you’ll kill it.
And that is true of the Earth, too.

---

As we tend the garden,
we feel the reciprocity of care.
The soil receives our touch,
and in return, we receive
a sense of belonging.

We begin to accept our bodies as sacred ground—
not problems to be solved,
but ecosystems to honor.
We remember that the feminine
includes birth and death,
growth and decay,
seed and compost.

---

Gardening teaches us to let go.
Every flower dies.
Every harvest ends.
Still we grieve,
and still we learn.

Fertilizing a dying plant
cannot bring it back;
love sometimes means release.
We mourn, we gather seeds,
we turn the stalks into compost,
and begin again.

---

This is transformation—
the living metaphor of death and renewal.
We practice it with our hands
until our hearts understand.
Old habits loosen,
old cravings soften,
relationships change form
and continue in another way.

Through communion with Nature,
consumerism quiets.
The Self grows humble, porous,
alive to the larger web.

For She—the Earth, the Teacher—
is always whispering:
die and so to grow.
Only then do we belong,
no longer troubled guests,
but partners in the dark, rich soil
of the feminine.

gardens ~ bj 2014