Thoughts While Weeding the Garden

On my hands and knees

Weeding between calendula flowers at Evergreen.

We spend most of our waking hours in an upright position. We poke out into the world, bold heads pointing towards the sun. We’re a statement in space. Something to be reckoned with.

But this morning I was on my hands and knees, weeding the garden.

Thoughts While Weeding the Garden

As hands slid between flowers and weeds and knees grew damp as jeans soaked up overnight rain, I mused on the cultural meaning of us bending our knees.

We bend one knee, or get down on both, to show deference to another. We’re lower than the person to whom we’re bowing. Our head is normally bowed too, and eyes cast down. Traditionally, this reason for being on our knees is to make us feel inferior and vulnerable. This doesn’t usually benefit us. Nor does it benefit the person we’re bowing down to because it tends to make them feel superior and powerful.

But when we go on hands and knees to weed the garden, play with children, commune with Spirit weaving all things together, or examine a tiny flower to find heaven in it as the poet William Blake did, this is a different matter.

This sort of bowing is good for our soul.

Why?

• This position makes us aware of our body.

• We see the world from a fresh perspective.

• Our mental habits are startled out of existence and inspiration enters.

• We feel grateful, peaceful, part of the whole.

It’s time for lunch. I stand and stretch. Hands are dirty, fingernails ruined, there’s sweat on my brow, an ache in my back and two kneecaps that throb like red hotspots on an online map indicating the position of raging bush fires.

But the air in my lungs is as fresh as that found by Eve in Eden, my face has been touched by the sun and the trilling call of a kingfisher diving in the winter lake fills me with a glow that won’t be extinguished by world news.

It’s good to get down on our hands and knees every now and then.

With love, Marlane