Reverend Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

June 22, 1997

When I moved into my house about a year ago, one of the first things I spotted in the lawn were some large plants on the side of the house. They were quite tall, and they looked like they had been there for a while. There were three large clumps, and from the bases of these clumps came a bunch of stalks that were covered with heart-shaped leaves. The stalks of the plant looked like bamboo.

As the summer went by, they kept growing. Before long they were 10 or 12 feet high and they had taken over this side of the yard. They didn’t look terrible, but I also knew that they likely weren’t in the long-range plan I was beginning to imagine for the garden.

In the winter, I got my chance. During an ice storm, it was clear that they were not as mighty as they appeared. Their stalks were hollow, which made them pretty vulnerable to ice. After a good covering, they were all broken off, and not very attractive. They looked as if someone had gone through and broken off their stems, one by one. I took this as an opening to get rid of them. So, as winter came to an end, I cut them off down to the stumps. In the spring, I thought, I’ll finish the job by removing the stumps.

Spring came. We hadn’t had many warm days when the stumps started sprouting mightily. The looked like extra-large shoots of asparagus popping up all over the stumps. There was definitely still plenty of life here. When I had a person come to till up parts of my yard to make beds, it seemed like a good time to have him polish off the stumps. And that is what he did, bulldozing them away. Glad to be done with them, thought I.

Little did I know that taking out the stumps was only the prologue to the battle of the plant. It was not long after the stumps were plowed up that dozens of shoots came popping up in the newly turned soil.

Since that time I’ve been digging them up, finding an extensive root system about 16 inches under the surface. It seems like I’ve been digging, and digging, and digging, pulling up pieces of root, and pulling up more pieces of root. And, time after time, more and more shoots keep coming up. What I keep learning is that any little piece of root, any shoot of life, if it is not removed, will sprout a new plant.

I think it could be a long summer.

In the process of creating my first garden, perhaps I’m learning an important lesson early on: That the garden is a meeting place for humans and for the wild ways of nature. Whatever designs I may have on this small plot of land, these plants may have another idea. This is the struggle. And they have certainly been on this site a lot longer than I have.

After the first few hours of digging up roots, I was pretty irritated, even angry. Perhaps it was the growing knowledge that this was not going to be easy. Perhaps my idyllic notions of garden were quickly disappearing. I was learning that things don’t always go as expected.

As the hours of digging went by, I slowly seemed to mellow out about the whole situation. For one thing, being outside digging in the dirt, whatever the task, was actually pretty fun. And I have to admit, chopping away at a root system with a pick ax is a healthy way to release some pent-up tension. After a few days, I came to see how I may as well settle in for the struggle, because this was going to take a while.

I’m now approaching the situation a little more mindfully. I’ve settled into a routine where I go out and dig up roots and shoots for an hour or two, carefully picking out each shoot or piece of root and making sure it is no where near open dirt where it can sprout again. In a few days I look to see how many more have come up. I’m usually surprised at how many new shoots I see. And I proceed to dig them up. And the cycle continues.

The battle with the weed has prompted some questions for me. Should I be making all this effort to get rid of something? It was here before me, so maybe I should just let it spread all over the yard. What, after all, am I doing out here? Yes, this is my garden, but clearly some of the things here have been around for a long time. And they are prepared to stay.

So far, I’ve decided to see where the spirit leads. It is tempting to find the right chemical to take care of the plants, but I really don’t want to do that. That could lead to other problems down the road.

I expect this will go on , probably throughout the summer. And, I expect, eventually I’ll make some headway. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do about the fact that the plants in question are also on the other side of the fence, in my neighbors yard. Who knows, I may have signed on to a yearly summer ritual.

Life is not without its struggles and gardening certainly isn’t either. Gardens, whether they are in our backyards, in the form of a small sand garden in our home or in our imaginations, are creations that are part of our mythology. In the story of Eden, we have the image of the garden as paradise, a place where everything is good and whole.

People who are gardeners will tell you that they find paradise in the garden. In the work and in the pleasure. It is a place where life slows down a bit and we are able to let our imaginations free.

In Jung’s view, this is what a garden is all about. In its structure, it represents a place for us to hold all the meandering thoughts and emotions and fantasies that fill our emotional lives. The garden creates a context for us to see ourselves as part of something larger. It is a place we carry with us, a place where we hold together the events and thoughts of our lives. A place to imagine. A place of our own in nature that we are charged to tend and care for.

Growing up and living day to day is a process of discovering who we are in the context of the world around us. Like the plants that grow in the garden, we come to find our place in the family of things and learn what works and what doesn’t work for us. What we like and what we don’t like.

We learn about which soil we grow in and the soils we wither in. We take responsibility for the garden or gardens we are planted in and do our best to care for that ground. It is the place where we can let our imaginations create something that is growing. Our sweat contributes to this, and we are able to see the results. It is a place for us to go from a world that can move at a much faster pace.

And we come to figure out which plants we want to nurture and cultivate and which ones are weeds we don’t want in our garden. This is a task that must be tended too continually or it will get ahead of us.

My weed is teaching me a great deal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our great Unitarian prophets, once said a weed was simply a plant whose virtues we hadn’t yet discovered. For Emerson the closer a plant and a place were to the wild, the better. If you let things grow where they wanted, things would be fine. If things were wild and free, it meant they had not been affected by the human hand. It was the natural order of things.

Michael Pollan, in his book “Second Nature,” tells the story of how he followed Emerson’s words. He planted a flower bed. He wanted it to be as natural has possible. He randomly spread flower seeds into a bed and let them come up, weeds and all. The first year, things relatively fine. He didn’t do anything about the weeds and they came up right next to the plants he wanted there, but his plants did survive. As the weeds grew up, he simply saw them as wonderful additions that would live in harmony with his chosen plants.

He was letting nature take its course.

The second year was another story. The weeds got a head start and his annuals never did make much headway. The weeds were in control and he doesn’t manage to get his garden back. He had to start over.

Pollan said he learned the lesson that it is important to keep the weeds out and to create a space for plants to grow.

Weeds, he says, are not just like any other plant you put into a space. What separates weeds from other plants is that they have a unique ability to thrive in a certain place, particularly human-cultivated places. Where garden plants have been cultivated for a variety of reasons—color, taste, size—weeds have adapted to a particular place and thrive in that place.

Weeds have come from evolution just like hybrid plants humans have developed. They have risen to do well where they are. They simply compete with the things we want in the place—things that are not as accustomed to living there. This is why they are so successful in specific places. And why, if allowed, will take over the place.

As humans have come to change nature—to introduce new plants to places and to radically change what was there—we have created fertile ground for weeds to flourish. We have removed the plants that were there, and this creates an opening for the weeds to come in.

Gardens are a place where human culture meets wildness. We come to our gardens wanting to create something and to care for something. This means we want some things there and we don’t want other things there. We take responsibility for the plants we keep and the plants we take out. We make choices.

Over many generations, human culture has already become intimately entwined with nature. It is our charge to make informed choices about what is best, to discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. We need to weed.

Pollan calls weeding the essence of gardening and of living.

We come to see nature not as something we are opposed to or have dominion over as much as we see it as something to care for and protect and sustain. If I use this herbicide, what effect will it have? Can I do it some other way? If I let this plant grow, what about the one that is already there? Can they both survive? The garden is something we nurture and bring along in the best way possible. It is part of a larger garden we sustain for future generations. As gardeners, we become agents of transformation, working to plant, sustain and build life.

As in life, we make choices—we learn and grow with the garden. It becomes an extension of us and we see ourselves there. It is a place where we see our own potential to be strong and healthy and growing. It is also a place where we see how weeds can take over and not give us much room for anything else. It is a place full of life.

A story from a garden.

A few years ago, a woman named Catharine Sneed worked at the San Francisco Country jail counseling women. After a few years of working with people in extremely hopeless situations, she herself became hopeless.

She developed a kidney disease that was called virtually untreatable. She connected it to the despair she was feeling from working in the jail, seeing women come back and come back and, over time, lose hope.

Her disease was progressing and Sneed was in decline. About this time, a friend gave her a copy of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" about farm workers and their attachment to the land. The book made a great impression. It sparked an idea to start a garden in the county jail that the women would maintain.

Probably because nobody expected her to leave the hospital, let alone recover, they agreed to let Sneed start the garden. There was an abandoned lot that could be cleared for the project.

When she back to the jail, Sneed shocked the women because she was so weak. She had to be carried out to the lot where the garden was being created.

But then something happened in the process of the garden taking shape. The women, working with their hands, preparing the soil, and caring for Sneed—started to take charge of the garden and to care for her. They started to care about something. Sneed began to recover.

Before long the program was thriving at the jail and had expanded to open a garden in a poor neighborhood of San Francisco to work with people released from jail. When I visited the garden a couple years ago, over 200 people were working there. They supply organic produce to some of the best restaurants and bakeries in the area.

Workers tend plots in the garden, do meditation and exercise and hear a message from Sneed. They are told to work hard and to believe in themselves. They work 15 to 20 hours per week and are paid a few dollars per hour. They are also told very honestly about the difficulty of breaking out of the culture of crime and drugs and violence that they have been a part of. They are encouraged and given hope, but they are also told how difficult it will be. Probably most importantly, they are told someone cares about them, believes in them and will be there with them along the way.

Somewhere along the line many of them go from being there mainly to earn money and start to take ownership of their own lives and of the project. For many, some inner spark is lit.

Before coming to the Garden, Mark sold drugs and was involved in gang violence since he was 11 years old. He came to the Garden, he says, primarily to earn money and to see what it was like. After being in jail, he didn’t have many options.

When he received his first paycheck, he became very angry when he saw some of his money went to something called FICA. He didn’t know what this was and became furious thinking someone had taken his money. He didn't know that FICA was for something called Social Security. When he saw this on his paycheck, he thought a person had taken his money. He was so far out of the system that he didn't know what it was to have deductions taken out of his paycheck.

That incident behind him, he grew in the job and more and more his motivation to be there changed. He started going to school part time while working at the garden. He was starting to take on some supervisory roles there and planned to continue in that direction.

As he grew, he began to help others to grow, which allowed him to grow even more. He was not starry eyed about his future. He was very aware of the difficulty of raising himself up out of a culture of drugs and poverty and violence.

But he clearly had the motivation and potential to do that. He had hope and he had determination. "I never thought I'd be able to influence somebody for the positive," he told me. He was doing that.

The delicacy of a plant, which needs the right soil, the sun, the rain, and good care, can teach us about the paradoxes of existence. Like plants, we need many things to grow and thrive. Most of all, we need attention and caring and someone cultivating the soil around us. We need to do the proper weeding to allow the plants we want to grow thrive.

And, paradoxically, the plants have amazing strength to endure. The forces of nature can be mighty, and yet little plants can come along and grow.

They have to have plenty of attention and compost.

George Bernard Shaw said “the best place to seek God is in a garden because you can dig for him there.”

In my own garden, I look forward to a summer of work and digging and learning. It seems the more I work and cultivate, the more I receive from the experience. The digging will continue, and I expect over time it will be a home for the plants I want to be there. And I don’t know exactly what it will look like. That will come over time. People tell me there’s at least one thing I’ll have to look forward to as my garden grows: slugs. May it be so. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.