Gardening with child: Invoking the greening powers.
A blessing for all who need healing.
Dear fellow pilgrim,
Even when I feel most lost, gardening grounds me. Taking time to work in the yard is not an escape, but always a coming home. One never has time to do this, one must take it.
And gardening with our 5 year old, as she mimics our earnest movements, or gets lost looking at a bug, is most like being home.
Moving dirt, digging holes, planting herbs.
“Look a caterpillar!”
“Can I eat it??”
“I want to water the baby plants…”
And on it goes.
I will never forget the shocked look on my daughter’s face when I introduced her to a baby plant. Eagerly and excited like a barely three year old she leaned over the first greens peaking from our garden bed and promptly ripped off a leaf.
“Ouch!” I said, “Ouch! This is a baby plant!”
My daughter looked at me, then at the plant, surprised and pained.
She was almost crying.
I was surprised as well.
We both arrived at a moment of wonder the same time – my daughter’s epiphany that plants are living beings, too.
Now it was my turn to comfort her, as she was heartbroken over having hurt the young baby plant.
I did not quite know what to do and so I did what I have done with her many times before.
I sang to my perplexed child, and to the baby plant, the German healing song for small injuries that my mother had sung for me:
.
Heile, heile Segen, morgen gibt es Regen,
übermorgen Sonnenschein,
dann wird Hanna / die Babyblume
wieder heile sein.
(healing, healing, blessing, tomorrow it will rain
after that the sun will shine,
then Hanna / the baby flower will be fine…)
When have you last sang a children’s healing song to your soul?
When I started singing this song to my baby daughter first it had quite some side effects for me, too.
It not only connected me with my own childhood pains, it offered a balm to my weary soul, too. And it still does.
Whenever we sing it to her, we sing it also to ourselves.
Like a lullaby for a weary soul in need of healing for the injuries we have given or received on the way.
Singing it back then in the garden consoled my child who was feeling bad for hurting a plant. So much that we often returned to the plant over the following weeks to watch it grow into a beautiful flower and to sing the song.
This healing song is also a living expression of viriditas, the greening life force as Hildegard of Bingen has written about so beautifully:
“Viriditas is the natural driving force toward healing and wholeness, the vital power that sustains all life's greenness.”
“Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty – it could not be creation without it.”
Now, as we garden in the late Spring humidity, our walking and working the gardens are intimately connected with medieval philosophy and with this moment of our daughter’s philosophical enlightenment.
Here is my hope and blessing for you for this second half of the week:
May the healing powers
of the greening life
around you
and within you
and under you
nourish you
console you
and heal you.
In the time it takes a rose
to open,
may you be healed.
Peace and love always, Almut
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In case you missed it:
I have been in a meditative space these past few days in the garden, removing weeds-- those greens that are not fitting into the conversation with the other plants. I sometimes struggle with the executive decisions I make to remove some plants and not others...
Thank you for reminding me of moments years ago when my little ones accompanied while gardening.