The Courage of a Gardener: Hope Awakening Again

“Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honor.”

The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

For years now, I’ve harbored the oft-spoken desire to start a vegetable garden. It hadn’t ever quite become solidified enough in my mind to be a goal, but somehow the idea of planting seeds or seedlings in the dirt, watering them, watching them grow, and eventually harvesting the literal fruits and vegetables of your labor has, over the past few years, captured my imagination and blossomed there.

One day, I kept telling myself, when I have more time.

One day, when I have a good space for it.

One day … one day …

Well, this spring, the world turned upside down, and that day finally came. Or rather, this spring, the world turned upside down, and I decided it was high time I stopped putting off the things I’ve always wanted to do, and if at all possible, and if at all beneficial, to simply do them. Such a shift in philosophy is doubtless to be expected when the every-day “normal” we so easily take for granted suddenly becomes a thing of the past.

It is a marvelous, and at the same time, terrifying, wake up call to the reality that each day is a gift and time is not infinite, and perhaps we should, as author and speaker Allen Arnold puts it, “live wildly unbalanced as [we] pursue what matters most with God and with joyful abandon.”

So, shaken awake by the unsettling of the world from what had become my rhythm—putting off all nonessential dreams until next week or next month or next year—I embraced my hobbity love for green and growing things, and together with all the family members I could recruit, set to work.

It is only a tiny thing, our vegetable garden. A valiant first attempt. But barely a garden by anyone’s standards, let alone a master gardener like Samwise Gamgee. Still, it is ours and I am proud of it. Ridiculously so, considering I contribute nothing to the actual work that is occurring as the plants grow … and already, they are growing! Tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, bell peppers, and sugar snap peas (which for some strange reason I cannot explain, other than that it is so much fun to say, I want to keep calling “spring sprouts”).

And the marvel of that growth happening moment by moment and day by day as the plants gather nutrients from the soil, drink up the rain, and stretch in the sun, brings me to my knees in awe. It is an ordinary miracle, a natural thing, but a magical thing nonetheless, a thing of beauty woven into the fabric of the universe by the Master Gardener who causes all things to grow.

I, who can pour far too much effort into the work of my hands, who often spends far too long agonizing over a single word or the placement of a line break, and who struggles with the strain of waiting and the inability to control what happens once the work has left my hands and entered the world, now find myself not only welcoming the opportunity to weed and water the garden but also welcoming the chance to rest and watch and wait as the garden grows without me.

I cannot escape the sense that this is a moment of growth for me too.

And somehow, as I awaken each morning, eager to venture outside to water the plants and see the changes that have emerged overnight, the thing that is growing inside of me, unfurling its delicate stalks and leaves like a fragile seedling reaching for the sun, is hope.

Lately, it has begun to feel like hope—in the temporal and not eternal sense—has so often been squeezed and crushed and stamped and smothered within me that it has been reduced to a cold, weak, and waning thing. Not quite dead but gasping. Not quite blown out but barely a spark. Not quite gone but not quite here either.

It sounds a mite dramatic when put that way but sometimes dramatic words are needed to convey abstract feelings. And perhaps I am not the only one who has felt this. Perhaps it happens to many of us as we grow through adulthood, as we emerge from the bright and seemingly endlessly possibilities of youth to the realization that we ourselves are not endless. It reveals itself in the sickly-sweet voice that offers consolation after disappointment, using phrases like “Did you really want that?” and “Maybe it’s best it didn’t happen” or “Would you really have been able to handle it?” A voice that at once deprives the dream of its brightness and the loss of its shadow and casts all in a featureless wash of gray.

And now, it is equally terrifying and exciting to feel hope stirring inside me again. Allowing it to awaken requires both courage and daring, because hope cannot remain safely buried. Like a seedling must part the earth, hope must crack you open to emerge, and in so doing, it exposes the delicate and unarmored heart of yourself to a world that seems to delight in crushing delicate and unarmored things.

Who knew gardening could demand such courage? And in the call to courage and the awakening of hope, in the need for faithful work and the equally faithful relinquishing of control, who knew gardening could bring about such healing?

Samwise Gamgee knew it, I think. During my latest rereading of The Lord of the Rings, it struck me that Sam is not simply a gardener by occupation. He is a gardener in heart and bone. It informs every aspect of his character and grants him the stouthearted qualities that define him from the start of the journey to the end: courage and hope, patience and determination, and the faithfulness of a healer and a nurturer.

Even in his defiant song in the tower in Mordor, after Frodo was poisoned by Shelob and taken by the orcs, when at the end of all hope, Sam lifted up his voice and sang, he began with a reminder of spring and of growing things to combat the darkness and desolation that surrounded him.

He certainly knew it later, as he wandered through the recently scoured Shire, grieving a land that had been ravaged, visiting groves chopped down and left to rot, surveying hedges crushed and gardens abandoned. Remembering the gift of Galadriel, that tiny box filled with the dust of fair Lothlorien that he had borne to Mordor and back again, he opened it and began the work of healing.

“So Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed, and he put a grain of the precious dust in the soil at the root of each … The little silver nut he planted in the Party Field where the tree had once been; and he wondered what would come of it. All through the winter he remained as patient as he could, and tried to restrain himself from going round constantly to see if anything was happening.”

The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien

He seeded, tended, watered, waited, and hoped to see what would grow. And the land was restored by his work, but more importantly, hearts were restored by his work, and among the hobbits of the Shire, hope was kindled, hope survived, and hope flourished again.

Here we are at the end of my musings, and somehow this piece of writing has blossomed into something far longer than I intended. But just as there is healing in gardening and in learning to wait and to hope again, there is healing for a writer in the free flow of words and thoughts, and in the connections that form between feeling and reason as the work takes shape. Still, now that I have written … the garden is waiting. I think I am quite ready to set down my pen and wander outside for the third time today, to sit and breathe, to rest and watch the garden grow, and to feel hope flourishing again.