simpleandgrounded

(The following story by Banta Whitner appeared in Plough to Pantry | Spring 2016)

Freshly plowed fields dot the hills where I live, each one a blank canvas awaiting the artist’s vision. Every spring, without fail, farmers and gardeners step beyond the newsfeed of the day to tend their soil. They turn “swords into ploughshares,” and plant seeds for a new harvest. This is our common ground.

Long before I learned to read and write, I was digging in the dirt. My great uncle Billy introduced me to organic gardening the summer before I started kindergarten. He and my great-grandmother lived on the outskirts of Cashiers, NC, where I spent golden nuggets of summer as a child.

One morning after breakfast, Uncle Billy handed me a basket. “Blueberry pickin’ time,” was all he said. I hung back at first, wary of this grumpy old man with his big booming voice. I had no idea he was an operatic baritone or coached opera divas in Manhattan. At five, the promise of a pie won me over.

He took to whistling as we headed down the stone steps to the garden. His gruff exterior melted away, replaced by a childlike joy I understood. At the rustic gate he stopped and spread his arms wide, “Here we are.” Even then I sensed we were about to enter sacred space.

Tucked into the hillside, invisible from the house above, his garden spilled out in every direction. Besides plump blueberries, Uncle Billy grew rhubarb and asparagus, purple eggplants, sweet onions and peppers, strawberries, and heirloom tomatoes. Herbs tangled among the vegetables—sage and dill, parsley and basil, rosemary and creeping thyme. To keep out hungry rabbits, chicken wire surrounded the tiers of greens—endive, spinach and kale, and more varieties of lettuce than I’d ever seen.

We filled the berry basket in no time, but my five-year old self had discovered a lifetime happy place. With grudging good humor, Uncle Billy nurtured the clumsy zeal I brought to his well-tended garden. He treated me like a grownup and shared what he knew.

That summer we sowed crookneck squash and field peas, pulled weeds and picked hornworms off tomato plants. I can still smell the rich loamy dirt, composted with eggshells and banana peels and cow manure, and I can hear the drone of Uncle Billy’s bees.

That grumpy old opera singer, a WWI veteran and closeted gay man, taught me how to listen to the land and coax food from earth. He taught me that healthy soil grows healthy plants, and that making good soil requires patience and huge amounts of compost.

More than that, he taught me that making a healthy human, a good idea, a sustainable relationship—all take time and lots of compost, too. Toss together the discarded scraps, shredded pages, broken hearts, the missteps, snippets of memory and sleepless nights. Let the ingredients heat up in a messy pile. Provide ample water and sunshine. Stir occasionally. With enough patience, new growth will take root and rise up from the compost. Every single time.

Illustration courtesy of Stephanie Sipp

My great-grandmother Bella knew how to embellish a story. She liked to tell about the day she painted her baby brother bright green. The way she remembered it, she was a bossy nine-year old, and little Riggs was five at the time. I was sure she was making the whole thing up.

“No, baby, I’m telling it straight like it happened. I see it so clear in my mind’s eye. Riggs was too big for his britches. He was sassy and wouldn’t mind me when I had to babysit him. One Saturday I got him real good. Told him how proud Mama and Daddy would be to see him painted the same color as the lawn chairs. Told him he would be their favorite yard art. He fetched the paint and brushes himself. I couldn’t let him down. So I painted him, short pants and all, from the bottoms of his chubby feet to the top hairs of his blond head. I left little white circles around his eyes and one around his mouth, and room to breathe through his nose. He was a masterpiece to behold.” She sighed with pleasure at the memory.

“Course I got the whippin’ of my life when Mama and Daddy got home. Sent to my room without supper. And Mama had to bathe Riggs in turpentine and tomato juice twice a day for a week to get the green tint off his skin. Riggs hated baths. He squirmed and cried like a stuck pig through it all. Served him right. Pesky brat.”

“C’mon, Bella, you didn’t really paint your brother green, did you? He’d have smothered to death or something.”

Bella shrugged off my challenge. “Believe what you like,” she sniffed, “I know what I know.”

Memory makes mistakes. We humans rarely recall events in their entirety. More often, we file them in multiple compartments—the visual in one box, the sensory in another, the tactile in another, and so on. Our memory retrieval is partial and inexact.

Siblings, friends, coworkers, experience the same event and recall it differently. Or not at all. We minimize or we embellish, based on our emotional wiring, our roots, our wounds, our capacity for what AA calls a ‘searching and fearless moral inventory.’ Every time we remember an event, we reconstruct it just a little differently.

Why does this matter? Because we create the narrative of our lives with the building blocks of memory. We humans need a story line. We depend on autobiography to remind us who we are. Yet that very narrative also holds us hostage. It contains the potential for self-harm as well as growth. How we interpret the memories of our past—the elements of our story line—makes all the difference.

Change the story, change your life. Is it really as simple as that? Yes, both as simple and as complicated. Stuff happens to us, joyful stuff, painful and traumatic stuff. We make faulty interpretations of events. We “misremember” bits and pieces, hold on to some of the bits, let go of others. We file, lose, delete, retrieve, reconstitute—in waking hours and in our dreams. Find the thread and follow the story line. Where does it take you?

Think about a story you believe about yourself. How does it serve you? If you told this bedtime story to your child self, would you want to hear it again? Would it give you nightmares? Or would you go to sleep with a smile on your face, feeling safe and loved?

You can change the story line any time you want. With mindful intention, you can live into a new narrative that serves and promotes your greatest good, rather than one that perpetuates old hurts and fears. Philosopher-teacher Wayne Dyer liked to compare a person’s past to the wake behind a boat. Depending on the size and speed of the boat, the wake can be gentle or turbulent, but it has absolutely nothing to do with driving the boat forward. The wake is what the boat leaves behind. Dyer advocated we think of our past as the wake behind the boat, and let it go.

By loosening the attachment to our personal history—that story line that holds us hostage—we give ourselves the freedom to choose a new and more positive story, one that propels us forward rather than keeping us stuck in old patterns. The point is, we get to choose.

Surrender was never my strong suit. If you are someone who makes long-range plans, or keeps a detailed to-do list, or chafes at travel delays, then we speak the same language. You know what it’s like to get so attached to a certain outcome that you tie yourself in knots to predict and prevent all the pesky what-ifs that might capsize that boat.

But life unfolds true to her own plan, not ours. Trying to control the flow simply guarantees frustration. Somewhere along the way, we forfeit our happiness and put our relationships at risk. And by clinging to that illusion of control, we also miss the extraordinary gifts of the present moment.

The need to control is rooted in fear. When we let fear and anxiety run the show, they bully us into thinking we have to be in control all the time. They convince us that dire things will happen if we let go of the reins. Turns out, they have it dead wrong.

Fear and anxious worry beget more fear and worry, not less. They bury us in the what-ifs and steal our energy. They seduce us into thinking they’ll protect us from harm, but that’s a lie. Fear and worry never kept anyone safe. And when fear manages our choices and decisions, we often veer way off course.

In certain contexts—like war, sports, and politics—surrender connotes a white-flag retreat, a giving up or giving in, a backing down or crumbling under pressure. We grew up with the old adage that “quitters never win and winners never quit.” When that rule bleeds into our personal and inner lives, we turn everything into a struggle. But away from the battlefield and the ball game, the campaign trail and the boardroom, we can opt out of that relentless win-lose-draw mentality.

Even in difficult circumstances, we always get to choose our response. Always.

According to psychologist/author Amy Johnson, “Surrender literally means to stop fighting. Stop fighting with yourself. Stop fighting the universe and the natural flow of things. Stop resisting and pushing against reality.”

Some faith traditions call this spiritual surrender—to completely accept what is, and have faith that all is well, even without one’s individual input. Lest this sound too passive, be assured this kind of surrender is not about inaction. Rather, it’s about what Buddhists call “compassionate action”—the practice of active compassion toward self and others.

I like to think of surrender as a threshold, a path of less insisting and more allowing, less holding on and more letting go. Instead of pushing back, imagine how it would feel to soften your resistance—to a change in plans, or something new on the horizon. The art of surrender, in this scenario, invites us to melt into the present moment. When we surrender ego and will, and get out of our own way, we yield to the fullness of now.