The Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

My garden is planted – not in the ground, but in pots, again.  I’ll be tending it over the rest of spring and throughout the long, hot northern Virginia summer.  And I’ve planted hopes in here along with the tomatoes, herbs, butter lettuce, berries.  Hopes for a bountiful harvest – both of fruits and vegetables and of memories as I tend these pots with my littles.  Hopes of faces puckered with the juicy tang of a fresh cherry tomato, of the wonders of blueberries growing right on our patio, of blessings blooming in this home all year round as I’ve bribed the goddess with the lavender by my garden gate.  And of bountiful harvests of food and connection to you, my friends.