At this time of year, when the weather has turned cold and rainy, I generally am able to catch up with my reading. I have dramatically cut back on my magazine subscriptions as I never seem to be able to find the time to read them. I guess I am just a book person.
But I found an old Newsweek from early October, 2012 as I was cleaning out a box of "stuff" and it was one that had been buried in the pile so the cover didn’t even look familiar. Not sure why I kept that issue, I quickly leafed through to see if there was anything important about national affairs worth saving. There wasn’t. Most of the issue featured the Republican run for president in 2012. Would we call those the "good old days," I wonder? But I digress.
Being of a certain age, I stopped short at a photograph of Beatle George Harrison. Author Paul Theroux wrote a review of a documentary about George (I always considered myself on a first-name basis with all of the Beatles) by Martin Scorsese called “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” (An HBO product, it may still be available.). George was never my favorite Beatle, so I can’t say I ever followed his post-Beatle history, except for enjoying a few great songs that he put out as a solo act and with the Traveling Wilburys. So here was an opportunity to learn more about The Quiet Beatle.
Of course, I knew of George’s passion for music, and vaguely remembered of his foray into film production with Monty Python’s Life of Brian. And then I read a paragraph that astonished me: George had a passion to get back to the earth; he was an avid gardener. Apparently, he loved getting away from the maddening crowds and digging in the dirt, planting trees and growing flowers and vegetables. In fact, George considered himself to be a full-time gardener and parttime rock star.
He had started learning about gardening when he worked on a veggie plot with his father in Liverpool as a young lad. Over the years, George took it to a serious level when he became famous and could afford a series of homes where he could plan and plant gardens. He gardened as a way of therapy, a time of meditation, that helped him to think through problems and in troubled times.
But it is in Paul Theroux’s words that I found the most beauty and truism:
"A gardener is inevitably someone with humility, who sees that these trees will eventually outlive him; the gardener is generous, optimistic, nurturing, taking pleasure in the planting but also making something beautiful for others."
I guess I had never really thought of gardening as being a humbling experience, but of course it is. We try to create a special world of our own by choosing plants we enjoy growing, be it roses or hostas or vegetables. But we are always at the mercy of the elements; wind, rain, sun, cold, and heat as well as lack of rain or sun or heat all are conditions over which we have no control. And yet we continue to try.
We irrigate when we need water. We block the wind when we know it will damage our efforts. We grow in raised beds and cold frames to warm the soil and give us an advantage in the late summer or early spring. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But we keep on trying.
For me it is the process of gardening that I enjoy most, not the results. I like shopping for new plants. I like planting those plants or moving other ones to new areas that might help them grow better. I like fall clean-up when I cut back the hostas, trim back the roses, and pull out the annuals. I even find weeding to be therapeutic. I enjoy the calm I feel when I concentrate only on the action and not on what other chores or work I should be doing.
Sometimes I wish I did like the results best. If this was the case, I would take more time to sit and enjoy my garden instead of hopping up every minute or two to tend to a weed or deadhead a flower. But it’s hard for me to sit in the garden, even though I have enough benches scattered around to make that possible. I just need to be gardening.
It’s kind of nice for me to know that that is how George Harrison felt when he gardened, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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