Strength and the Hermit, part 2: Strength, Self-Conviction, and My Garden
I’m going to tell you a little story about different aspects of my past that are connected to my changing relationship to gardening.
This story begins when I was a young child growing up in rural Indiana.
My maternal grandmother and my father both grew a lot of food. From humble compost piles to flowering fruit trees, from root vegetables to towering stalks of corn, I was gifted countless lessons regarding tending soil, planting seeds, and growing edible and medicinal plants.
A few memories that stand out:
Once, when I was about 10 years old, my dad and I were harvesting the potato bed. While we were we gently feeling our way through the fertile soil to find the precious potatoes hidden therein, Dad taught me the word “friable,” particularly as it relates to soil. Friable soil has room for worms to wriggle, roots to grow, and water to flow where it needs to go. Friable soil makes space for growth, life, and change. Friable soil teaches us about the strength that results in a willingness to yield, to adapt, to let go. Friable soil makes space for others, even while continuing to honor its own weight, gravity, and massive impact upon the world around it.
I’m not going to lie: I absolutely hated all things compost related when I was a kiddo. It stunk. It was hot, buggy, and filled with worms. The items in the kitchen cannister where we kept food scraps was downright disgusting, and there were times when it was all I could do to keep myself from gagging when I had to carry it out to the pile. But, of course, I was given so many lessons about the literally life-giving qualities of compost. I watched my dad wield his pitchfork with strength and fluidity as he turned and tended the piles. Because Dad and I are both practitioners of Zen Buddhism, the relationship between the garden and the compost pile became a daily reminder of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Now, as an adult, I am enamored with this process of transforming dead and dying scraps from food and yard into the soil that enables new birth to arise.
When we honor and respond to what’s there, it can nourish us for a long time into the future. As my grandma got older, she transitioned away from doing a bunch of canning, but she continued to preserve food: she just switched to preserving more of it through freezing than through canning. I currently do a mix of freezing, canning, fermenting, dehydrating, and seed saving. There is always something truly magical about a big spoonful of strawberry jam made with homegrown strawberries, but in February it can feel like a ray of sunshine reaching all the way to my core… and I can’t think of many things that give me a greater sense of hope for the future than watching a seedling grow from a seed I collected from one of the previous years’ plants.
On the left: the Strength card from MJ Cullinane’s Crow Tarot Deck. On the right: the Strength card from Chase Voorhees’ Tarot of the Holy Spectrum Deck.
So what does this have to do with the Strength card?
A lot.
Let me start by telling you about some other memories I have; unfortunately, these come with a Content Warning, as they describe moments from past relationships of mine that were absolutely abusive. None of what I am about to recount are memories of the abuse itself, but they are definitely descriptive of unhealthy dynamics. If you would rather skip past this part, you can scroll down until you see a paragraph that starts with /END CONTENT WARNING/.
You see, after I moved out of my parents’ homes, I spent several years living in dormitories and apartments when I was lucky, the back seat of cars and abandoned barns when I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing a lot of gardening in those years, and I missed it tremendously. However, what with the lack of access to time or space to garden, I was unable to.
During this time, I had several relationships that were marked by pain and toxicity. I received and believed many negative messages about myself, including one partner in particular who repeatedly told me, “You are irreparably damaged.” Other messages that I received and came to believe convinced me that I could not trust myself, that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and that I was incapable of taking care of myself.
One of these partners also happened to work for a landscaping company at the time, and they talked a lot about plants. I would occasionally try to chime in with something that I knew or remembered, but I was almost always shot down. This partner liked to emphasize to me how long it had been since I had grown anything, and to meanly draw attention to any gaps in my knowledge that snuck into what I shared. When we did finally rent a home that had a yard, they took over all of the gardening despite my repeated requests to help, clearly communicating that it would be better if they did it.
The result was that, by the time I ended that relationship, I was convinced that I didn’t know anything about gardening, that I wasn’t good at it, and that no matter what I did I would continue to not be good at it.
/END CONTENT WARNING/
Fast forward to now, and I have done a lot of healing (including working with a therapist who is also a trauma specialist: I am an enthusiastic supporter of getting mental health care!). I have also done a LOT of gardening. When I first bought our home four years ago, I started very small, and with a great deal of trepidation. Each year since, I have done a bit more gardening, a bit more work towards transitioning our yard into a beautiful plot of herb-y, flowering, edible wonder. This was the year when I finally did away with the last of our grass lawn: while there are still a few stubborn and invasive hangers-on, almost every single thing currently growing on our property is edible and/or medicinal.
And it’s flourishing. It abounds in colors and flavors, and our whole property is a mini sanctuary for birds and pollinators. We love it.
As it turns out, I am very good at growing, tending, and listening to plants. Do I know everything about permaculture and gardening? Nope. Not at all. But the many lessons of my childhood and adolescence gave me a firm foundation, and I have now continued to seek out information that has been relevant regarding caring for the flora and fauna on our little property here in western New York State.
All of that simply illustrates the way that it can be so, so easy to take on other people’s beliefs about who we are and what are shortcomings are, even when they are absolutely, 100% untrue.
So, yeah: the Strength card.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Strength card “is not the strength of the ego, nor is it the strength of the physical self, but rather the strength of spirituality, connection, and survival. As Rachel Pollack writes in her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, this card depicts ‘the inner Strength to confront yourself calmly and without fear.’ It invites us to look at where fear, shame, and other people’s beliefs about who we are and what we can and cannot accomplish have held us back. It invites us to shed these unnecessary layers and develop an unapologetic, yet still tender, relationship to our innermost selves and the world around us. To further quote Rachel Pollack, ‘Strength opens up the personality… with a sense of peace, a love of life itself, and a great confidence in the final result.’”
Ah: there it is! That deep connection between my gardening and the Strength card. By reconnecting with the soil and the countless growing things, I am letting go of shame and freeing myself from the weight of other people’s beliefs about who I am. The ground and the plants teach me about love, and attention, and responding to moments as they come.
It occurs to me as I write this how ironic this whole post may seem to those who know me primarily through my work as a strength coach. Oh, sure: I can put a lot of weight on a barbell and lift it. I can even bend steel with nothing but the strength of my body. I can hoist kettlebells and open horseshoes.
But that’s not what taught me about strength.
Look at the cards shown above. Notice how the crow stands gently but confidently on the snout of the lion, unstartled by his roar. See how the youthful person gazes into the eyes of the lioness, knowing the tenderness that permeates her despite the sharpness of her teeth. See how both cards have an infinity sign that hovers over it all, testifying to the interconnectedness of all things and the cyclical continuity of existence. In these cards, I see deep presence, confidence, insight, and love.
The strength isn’t the roar or the teeth, it’s the tenderness. It’s not the hunt or the forward charge, it’s the stillness of a moment of connection. It’s not the ego, it’s the attention.
I am learning, more and more as life goes on, that strength is so very, very gentle. This lesson is in the tarot… it is in the garden… and, above all, it is right here, in this very moment.
To read the rest of the posts in this series, visit:
