Take Good Care of the Garden and Dogs 5-21-10

Deep Gap, North Carolina

Several weeks ago I was given a compelling book to read. As captivating as Heather Lende’s book about family, friends, and faith in small town Alaska is, I simply could not get it read for all the white noise in my life. E-mail develops an urgency all its own and erodes precious reading time. For those of us addicted to attention and connection, even if only virtual, it’s a continual struggle to stay in 3 D. Once back in 3-D, pressure washing the house, staying ahead of jungle that grows so well in the American South, washing, ironing, cooking, going to the gym, and a million other bits of busyness conspire to keep me from reading books as I once did.

Here in Appalachia there’s a chance of winning my struggle, if but for a season. My first day on retreat I could hear a distant pressure washer, but I was not running it. Lawn mowers keeping order to ‘my’ emerald paradise on the second day did not need me to drive them. Weeds are kept at bay without my assistance. Meals are brought to my door, things are painted, logs are split for next winter’s heat, clean towels and bedding appear. Botanical wonders bloom all about me because others decided before winter they needed to do so when I showed up in spring.

True hospitality can be a strange sort of thing to experience – a forbidden fruit of sorts. So many of us have been programmed to believe our existence must be earned and certainly taking up space in someone else’s Paradise must be paid for somehow, by sweat of the brow, with money, by some transactional exchange or barter. For the years I have been granted to come up here to stay in someone else paradise, I have struggled with the price of admission – none. It’s simply counter-intuitive to me how hospitality better than anything found in the great hotels of the world doesn’t cost a king’s ransom, doesn’t cost anything. I can only marvel at what drives people to provide such rich experience for strangers. I may have been here a number of times and no longer be classed a stranger, but I’m certain this paradise is open to any person on the planet who shows up at the door, here at the end of the road.

Others go about their business so I can go about mine, which at present seems to be little besides watching butterflies seek first pollen and giving treats to the five dogs that supervise Paradise. When not doing these small tasks I ‘collect’ this world with my cameras – feeling a bit like a high-tech David Thoreau. It’s amazing how busy a pond can be – fish leaping, lilies growing, butterflies pollinating, dogs chasing logs, flying insects breeding to support clouds of song birds, irises giving bees something to do, water evaporating to fuel Earth’s hydrologic cycle. Suddenly, my contributions to any meaningful effort to keep the world going seem less important. None of these processes need my assistance whatever. My present job is simply to gain realization I don’t have to be in charge of anything.

In recovery we often find ourselves in company with those tormented by perfectionist over-responsible inclinations. We feel our input and oversight are essential to the proper workings of the universe. Many of us spent a lifetime alienating those around us with our pressured over-performance and micro-management. The foundational lesson in recovery is that we are really powerless to manage our own lives, let alone those of others. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children ... When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well.

One of the hardest aspects of hospitality is allowing it to simply wash over us, not trying to create it, alter it, earn it, or justify why in a world of scarcity we are beneficiary to its grand opulence. A curious incident recorded in Luke’s Gospel in seven short sentences describes Martha who was fretting because others weren’t participating in her over-performance, even asking Jesus to coerce her sister Mary to get off her backside and get busy. Mary was sitting around listening to Martha’s Guest. Jesus said he would not deprive Mary of having made the better choice of offering the gift of listening and attention, rather than performance.

When I attempt to create, alter, earn, or justify hospitality to look good I have chosen Martha’s way. When I simply sit and listen to the still small voice of God through buzzing insects or even the birds of the air, perhaps I have chosen Mary’s better way, even if it is counter-intuitive to everything I was ever taught in alcoholic childhood.

Perhaps for me, this short season of life includes taking good care of the garden and dogs by appreciating both, offering the dogs treats and sharing images of these gardens with others who have no access to them; those trapped in ancient or dying bodies that have betrayed them, or those imprisoned inside institutions or the super-max of tortured minds. Perhaps, my ‘job’ is to simply tell these prisoners of life circumstances, full pardon is offered to all who will accept it. In the Father’s Paradise we will find ultimate hospitality and there will be no need to create it, alter it, earn it, or justify it. Jesus paid it all. Here in Appalachia it occurs to me that I am experiencing real world hospitality that is a metaphor for hospitality that is going to be out of this world. Life is very good.

In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; If it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to myself; that where I am, there you may be also.