Pop 89: The Next Great Gift
By Madonna Hamel
Today we ventured into the garden. Time to clear the rest of the sweet carrots buried over winter. To space the strawberry plants and spread the chicken shit. There’s a rose arbour out back that hasn’t been tended in a while. Hacking through thorns and winding the branches up and over trellises, I haul out a bench that crumbles in my fingers due “wet coast” rains. There is something encouraging about clearing a place for respite and renewal as Spring finally takes her place after a long hard winter.
Watching my brother revel in his garden, the first time since the stroke, reminds us all of how fragility and fear, for all their looming intensity, is riven by beauty. At one point, sifting the soil and staring into the woods, Doug begins to hum a song. There is such delight in that moment - when you find yourself humming after you’ve been slogging through sorrow or worry or fear or pain for what seems like eternity. The delight is not a winning-the-lottery kind of delight, but more like a turning-the corner-and-encountering-a-lilac-bush-in full-bloom delight. You register it in your weary soul, but not so much that you think to mention it to anyone else. And yet, it changes the whole trajectory of your day. Because, suddenly, life is a sweet and beautiful thing, and you are at rights with the world. Best not to examine the delight too closely, in case you chase it away.
This evening we made quiches from bounty collected, dried and frozen, then stored in “the cold room” over the years. Celery, leeks, onions, cherry tomatoes mixed with sour cream and eggs from a duck farm across the island poured into pie shells. We made a large salad from sorrel and kale growing in the Winter greenhouse. My youngest sister tells us about an upcoming trip to the other coast - the Atlantic provinces. My brother is reminded of the year he cycled across the country and found work on a dairy farm in Nova Scotia. He hauls out his old maps and journals with drawings and bits and pieces of conversations from decades past.
Decades. We sigh at the fact that we siblings have entered our 60s. We ask the old the familiar question. When did that happen? And: Where does the time go? It went where our energies went, into work - in Doug’s case: up North building scaffolding, in Banff building homes, in Kelowna creating landscapes etc. It went into travels across country, around Ireland, sitting at cafe tables on a Parisian sidewalk thinking of Hemingway, Stein and Picasso. It went into relationships with trees, white-water, The Moon and all critters. And, especially, it went into long nights over beers, tea, and bonfires with friends and family. It went and continues to go, where it will, like a river finding the quickest way to the sea, like a garden roiling and boiling under the surface with even more critters, named and unnamed. The final frontier is, after all, the soil beneath our feet.
The song my brother hums just may be the same song sung by the microbes of the garden, or the scent of the newest flowers - crocus and narcissus and tulips with sturdy stems and petals the size of oyster shells. Or maybe the songs of all the relations: the humus of the creatures and humans who lived here before us. Everyone’s ancestors and relatives. If I can believe in holy spirits and the good, orderly direction of a unifying principle in the Uni-Verse, why not believe in the songs released by digging in the strawberry patch?
Today is Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday. And yes, I agree, all days are holy, as are all lands. For the last few decades, I think of this day as Gethsemane Thursday. There’s the hanging gardens of Babylon, there’s Eden and heavenly Paradise, but of all the gardens in the Judea-Christian mythology, Gethsemane hits me hardest. It’s the setting of the dark night of the soul, when one is haunted by some irretrievable truth, some irremediable loss, and the only solution is to both let go and be vigilant. To be wakeful to the next great gift.
The holy occasion that is Maundy Thursday creates a mix of both guarded vigilance and a mysterious anticipation so strong you don’t want to miss a second of it. Maundy Thursday also includes a stripping of the altar, or feast table, a washing of feet and a shared meal or, as it’s formally named - An Agape Meal. Then comes the vigil. It is a time of no talking, with the lights of the interior of the church, or the kitchen, dimmed to lighting encouraging serenity or a safe emergency exit.
I did this once in a cathedral in the heart of Toronto. It was a warm Holy Thursday evening. Over five hundred of us sat quietly. Five hundred, settled into the dark quiet of the cathedral while all around us, the city busied itself with evening entertainments. We could hear the click-clicking of high heels on the sidewalk, bursts of laughter coming from folks leaving work, headed for drinks or shopping at Eaton’s Centre. I sat smiling at the thought of one of them deciding to take a peak into the church, just to see what it looked like inside, unaware of the liturgical season, and seeing five hundred people sitting in silent prayer, waiting for the next gift, holding vigil for the whole suffering world. How freaked out they would be, dropping hold of the heavy door handle and running back into the busy night.
These days, every dinner is an Agape Meal; every night feels like Maundy Thursday. We sleep under the low glow of stars; we keep one ear open, listening for anything coming from Dougie’s room where we hope he’s sleeping peacefully, alert to what he, himself, calls “the next great gift.”