Humility

I sat back in my plastic chair, feet up on the strawberry pot, and surveyed the foot high raised beds filled with quality soil and, for the time being, plant free. The square and triangular beds lined up in straight rows, the paths were neat and the trellis, though bare, were sturdy and ready to offer support. The sun shown and the world felt full of promise. My husband and I had built something remarkable.

It was time for that next all important step. I had several envelopes of seeds. I opened one of “Big Boy” tomatoes (not to be confused with “Early Girl”. Where these genders come from is beyond me.) As instructed by various experts in the field I dug an appropriate size hole next to a trellis, dropped in a couple of seeds, and covered them with soil.

There is a line in the movie “Gandhi” where the Mahatma says “it’s always the simple things that take your breath away”. Indeed.

What could be more simple, more mundane, more ridiculously ordinary than a tomato seed. Dry, flat, kind of ugly. Big deal - but suddenly it was.

I poured more of the seeds into my hand and marveled at them, as if I had never seen such things before.

There was no booming voice from heaven, no rainbow across the sky, not even a little burning bush. Just the realization that my mind had opened to a new way of seeing and feeling. When I wasn’t looking, God had strolled up and was winking at me.

I who had basked in the glorious sense of me, and my marvelous garden construction realized I’d been trumped - big time – by a funny looking, common seed. The thing lacked pretense. There was nothing impressive about it. Yet it seemed to shout “Look at me – I am the product of 4 billion years of evolution and full of mysteries of life that are beyond your comprehension! I am capable of becoming a large living thing that will convert carbon dioxide and water into food and oxygen! Can you do that? Further, I have the capacity to reproduce myself thousands of times over.” This lowly seed represented the culmination of a journey that began with the big bang and could continue into the far reaches of the future. As Gandhi said, it took my breath away.

I am hardly the first to be struck by this perception. I suspect that most love of farming and gardening comes from an understanding – not necessarily literal – of the miracle of life that a seed or a plant represents. Brother Lawrence, a 17th century Carmelite lay brother credits the twig on a dormant, and seemingly dead, tree for his first understanding of God. The recognition of the life and potential within this mundane stick overwhelmed and humbled him.

“Gazing at the tree, Herman grasped for the first time the extravagance of God's grace and the unfailing sovereignty of divine providence. Like the tree, he himself was seemingly dead, but God had life waiting for him, and the turn of seasons would bring fullness. At that moment, he said, that leafless tree "first flashed in upon my soul the fact of God”.
(http://www.ccel.org/l/lawrence)


Of course, Brother Lawrence had no understanding of DNA, and the extraordinary methods, both deceptively simple and staggeringly complicated that God uses to move life forward. He could not know that life and the “unfailing sovereignty of divine providence” is contained in complex tiny arrangements of simple sugars and acids. He was unaware that the dormancy of the twig or the seed is not death but a stage of life determined by those chemical arrangements. But he didn’t need to know. He just needed to be present in the moment and willing to be amazed.

There are those who feel that our modern knowledge of some of life’s mysteries takes away from the awesomeness and magnitude of nature. I disagree. To me, understanding some of the mechanics of life enhances appreciation and the wonder of it. That I can share similar DNA with an avocado, or an earthworm is incredible and increases my respect for the inexplicability of existence. We humans have a tendency to want to separate ourselves out from the rest of life. We are “special”. Alas, humility does not come easily to the human animal. In fact we all come from the same place and are inexorably linked to all of nature.

Such human hubris has prevented most of us from appreciating the depth and staggering splendor in all of nature, even the most unassuming representatives. But for a moment, through no effort of my own, I was able to cut through my arrogance and get a glimpse of the magnitude of nature and reality. I pondered the ugly, unassuming tomato seed; grandeur in a commonplace container, and saw the miraculous.