Where You’re Planted
Photo by Alex Wolf
I go among trees and sit still
All my stirring becomes quiet
Around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
Where I left them, asleep like cattle…
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
And the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
-Wendell Berry
We’d been planning our move to central Texas from Los Angeles for a few months when the pandemic hit. In home isolation, we decided to move up our departure day. We packed up the life we’d known for nearly 20 years—and left unceremoniously. There were a couple of socially distant goodbyes, but there was no farewell event to speak of.
We retraced our steps from the previous couple of months, thinking back to the last time we saw each of those dear ones in our community—whether at a dinner party or a quick moment in passing—we suddenly held those moments closer, and I realized that unwitting goodbyes might be the best kind. For me, anyway. I couldn’t even tell my dentist we were moving. I doubt a farewell party would have been tolerable.
After the movers drove away, we did too. Glancing in the rearview mirror, we watched the sun set on our beloved city and on the first era of our life together. Sometimes our grief is detached from our minds for a time, so we can do what we need to do. In this case, our departure felt more like we were fleeing a city in quarantine under the cover of darkness, with our children (two and four years old), and driving straight through for 25 hours to our new home, a small cabin in the sticks.
We now live in the wild. Humans are the visitors on this land. Neighboring ranches report rattlesnake sightings. We find venomous scorpions almost daily in our house—on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, on the couch, in the bathtub. As we walk the fields we see evidence of the dangerous, destructive and ubiquitous feral hogs. Splinters, from unfortunate run-ins with the tiny glochids on cacti or unfinished door frames, lead to frequent micro-surgeries for removal. I carry tweezers in my pocket. The hellscape of summer brings its own form of oppression. I grew up in Texas, but I had forgotten the suffocating nature of 106-degree heat. I could go on. Sonic booms, mysterious scratching sounds and the scent of a skunk wafts through our windows waking us up in the morning.
We joke that everything here is trying to hurt us. But it didn’t feel personal until the cherished indoor plants I’d brought in a UHaul from LA started dying. Our cabin didn’t offer enough light to keep them alive. My husband gave me a small raised garden bed, and after planting seeds we quickly discovered that the choking heat and the blistering sun were burning the shoots before they could be established. I couldn’t grow anything inside or outside—for different reasons. Not enough sunlight here, too much there. And on a visceral level, I could relate. I had intuited a slow, but steady diminishment within me, too. I was wilting.
You may have heard Katherine’s heart-aching version of Habakkuk 3:17-19 after she suffered her stroke and could not care for her infant son James. I love her figurative retelling of those verses, and I have since become acquainted with the literal meaning. Sometimes the actual crops fail, the buds do not emerge, the fruit does not grow. My garden was a failed effort to compensate for my own soul-dormancy. What do I do if nothing will grow?
I spoke Habakkuk’s prescribed sacrifice of praise, “Yet, I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in God my Savior.” But my attempt seemed hollow.
Around that time, a relative, lamenting with me, shared about a season in her life when her motto was “Bloom Where You’re Planted,” which for many years she displayed proudly in her home on a pretty little plaque bordered with flowers. Her life took some turns until she was so disgusted with the command to bloom that she tried to destroy the plaque—not just throw it away. The fiberboard proved indestructible; she ended up just tossing it.
Photo by Alex Wolf
“By waiting and by calm you shall be saved,
In quiet and in trust your strength lies.”
Isaiah 30:15
I’ve long felt intimidated by the vast catalog of contemplative disciplines, viewing them as something else I’m supposed to do, follow in a particular order, using precise language, while journaling, as the sun rises, before checking my phone. What I’m finding my soul desperate for these days, though, is silence.
Sometimes the most helpful something is a sacred nothing.
Father Thomas Keating developed a silent practice called Centering Prayer, which he used for decades. And some who have studied his body of work observe an evolution in his writings about God. By the time he was in his eighties, Keating’s perception of God, through the habit of frequent “secret embraces” had altered his God-narrative and broadened his understanding of the expansive love of Jesus.
We, too, find ourselves on personal spiritual journeys. But in this modern era, with access to rich, instructive, inspiring content at our fingertips (as well as, let’s be honest, real crap), we tend to consume more than we can or should digest. Setting it all briefly aside for silence is a viable pathway to presence.
Silence is not a vacancy or void; it is the creation of an opportunity.
Photo by Alex Wolf
Martin Laird explains it this way: “Silence simply disposes us to allow something to take place. For example, the gardener does not actually grow plants. A gardener practices certain gardening skills that facilitate growth that is beyond the gardener’s direct control.”
By waiting … by calm … in quiet … in trust…
These are the prophet Isaiah’s spiritual gardening tips. The outcome is embedded in the process. We can stop spinning long enough for a root to take hold. But where? Where do we practice these gardening skills? In the book Nobody Cries When We Die, Patrick B. Reyes asks, “How often do we pay attention to the ground under our feet? How often do we reflect on the soil that sustains our generations and the generations to come? The soil determines our livelihood. One of the most common things to say at the start of spiritual practices is that we need to ‘ground’ ourselves. The footprints in the soil [are] a metaphor for the attentiveness to one’s own narrative. This theology of the soil will challenge us to think about how planting one’s feet commits one to being in relationship with all that is in that space in the particular moment.”
In silence, the very ground beneath our feet illustrates our being grounded in Christ. Christ, the soil. Christ, the gardener. Christ, the harvest.
I’ve come to see this harsh season as liminality, from the Latin word “limen,” which means threshold. Liminal space is the uncomfortable moment—or months—between what was and what will be. Whether you have relocated, lost your job, been given a diagnosis, or planted a seed.
Liminal space is a transition, a place of waiting and, perhaps most challenging of all, it is a space of not knowing.
When we’re in the dark, like the caterpillar in its chrysalis, the change is surely felt but cannot be seen. Most of the monarch caterpillar parts liquefy before it is formed into the butterfly. Liminal space is where our transformation occurs, if we learn to wait and let it—let Christ—form us anew.
Photo by Alex Wolf
I have felt overcome by the discomfort of these liminal months. I wish, though, that I had walked through it with night vision: naming it to tame it, leaning into it rather than being subdued by it, making peace with the awkwardness, rather than feigning an allergic reaction. Now that I know what it is, I succumb to its grace.
When we claim this sacred silence, our stake in the ground, we are creating an opportunity for something that would not otherwise happen. There are many words we want to say in our divine encounters. Let us try, though, briefly, to let the silence be the vehicle for what needs to be said. May we tend to our inner soil with silence. And in time, we, too, will find our story of faith altered by these secret embraces. I wonder what gift is on the other side.
