Another spring blankets Northern California with a rainbow of wildflowers and golden sunshine. Baby animals are opening their eyes for the first time, taking in the radiance of Earth, lush with new growth. Spring is when we crawl out of our winter caves and let Mother Nature nourish us with her bouquet. I welcome new hope in spring’s rebirth as I find connection and peace in my garden.
I don’t wear gloves when I garden because I love the feel of the cool, crumbly soil in my hands. The fresh soil feels like home. It smells so clean. Occasionally, when I’m digging down to make space for a tomato plant or a pumpkin, I’ll come across an avocado pit that didn’t decompose in the compost bin. I love when that happens because it reminds me that the Earth and us – we eat the same things. Whatever we don’t eat, we share with the garden as we nurture it. In turn, the garden feeds us. It’s a harmonious cycle that reverberates our oneness with the Earth.
It feels good to be in my garden this year. I didn’t bother much with gardening last year because my sister, Ellen, had just died. When her soul left her body, I felt mine going with her and lost myself in grief. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel my soul again, but it’s still there. If I touch the Earth enough, I can still feel hers too.
After Ellen’s death, I struggled so much trying to find a tangible way of connecting to her. Without her voice, her texts, her touch, I feel utterly lost sometimes. She is buried 2,265 miles away from me, in Pennsylvania. We laid her shrouded body to rest at the edge of a forest, next to a wildflower meadow. There is no coffin separating her from the soil. We planted a white oak sapling above her. As her body nourishes the soil, she offers herself back to the Earth and feeds the tree; she is becoming the tree.
I get so frustrated sometimes that we’re on opposite coasts. If I still lived back east, I could go be with her any time I wanted. I would spread out a tapestry by her tree, drink some coffee, and talk to her. I would touch the same soil that she’s part of, blanketing myself with her energy, feeling our two souls intertwined as they were from birth. I can’t do that from California. I’ve struggled to find her in the trees or the clouds. I had even convinced myself for a time that the Madonna-shaped knot on the oak tree across from my kitchen was Ellen reaching out to me. I was so terribly lost, fumbling alone through pitch-black darkness, desperate for her, my thoughts echoing and then lost in the void.
This spring, I really wanted to get back to my garden that I’d neglected last year. Fresh air, sunshine, nurturing new green life, and sharing myself with the soil was exactly the kind of therapy my soul was craving. I got busy starting vegetable seeds inside and preparing the soil outside. Every year, we inch a little closer to our yard being covered with edible spaces and pollinator gardens for our bees and the butterflies that visit our lavender every day. The sunflowers will be bursting this year, their happy faces reaching for the Sun.
One day in early April, I was transplanting California golden poppies, gifted by dear friends, from their yard to ours. Poppies have deep, long taproots. You have to dig down gently and so gingerly to get them out without breaking their gangling, carrot-like roots. Then to replant them, you need to make a deep hole through the topsoil into the black, loamy, living soil below. I was wrists deep in dirt, welcoming the poppies to their new home while the Indigo Girls harmonized in the background: “Gotta tend the earth if you want ro-ose!” A soft breeze was caressing the back of my neck. The Sun blew me a kiss before she sauntered off beyond the tip of a redwood tree, revealing the first shadows of late afternoon.
With my hands in the soil making way for tender roots, I could feel Ellen. Her soil fingers reached out and tickled mine. It might have been a worm, but it occurred to me in a rush of emotion that Ellen is the very Earth in my hands. She is the soil. Despite the miles that divide us, the soil she nourishes with her body and I nurture with my hands is the same soil; it’s all Earth. In that soil, we are one. Her tree exhales our sweet oxygen. My sister is in every flower, root, cucumber, and tomato plant. She’s the pollen in the dandelions that the honeybees carry to their hive to make delicious honey. She’ll be in the dandelion wishes my son blows off the fluffy white tufts in the fall. My sweet sister is here with me. Finally, I’ve found her, and she is everywhere.
I created an outdoor alter on her birthday (B-earthday, April 22), which helps me find her too. I now have a sacred space where I see her beautiful face in the waterproof metal photo collage I had made at Costco. I see her smile and hear her laughter. I relive conversations we had, inhale her scent, and feel her deep, snuggly hugs in her brown sweater she knitted in college, which I still hug sometimes. A couple of years ago, she made me custom dirt-scented bath salts that she named “earthworm” because dirt is my favorite smell. I open the jar rarely in case the scent ever escapes. When I do inhale it, it takes me to the most beautiful place, that precious union between my sister and the soil.
I’ve been learning about the yogic concept of Santosha (contentment) and how to apply it in these times that I feel lost without my sister. Santosha is one of five Niyamas in Yoga that refer to the duties or services we offer ourselves. The Niyamas are Saucha (cleanliness), Santosha (contentment), Tapas (discipline), Svadyaya (self-study), and Isvara Pranidhana (surrendering to power greater than ourselves). By honoring our observances of self and creating an inner sanctum of truth, we are freer to feel gratitude and accept what our lives are, right here and right now.
Santosha means being present and not living in the agony of what could be or should have been. Santosha is accepting what is beyond our control and finding a way to integrate the reality of what is into a space of contentment. It’s reminding myself that what I have is what I have, and that must be enough because I’m alive, part of this world, and doing ok. I am enough right now, as is.
When I feel my sister in the soil and sit with her alter, I am reminded that this connection is a precious gift. I will never have my sister back in human form. That’s the most painful reality I’ve ever had to come to terms with. I see in myself, though, the ability to reach out and touch her presence and find contentment, even bliss, in that. If I want to feel her in the Earth, I have to stop fumbling through the darkness and see myself, where I am, who I am, and what I cannot possibly change. Only then, in my contentment, does my sweet Ellen come to visit me.
