The
Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/19/13)
The late Branch Rickey, the baseball
manager who hired Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier in professional
baseball, managed the Brooklyn Dodgers and then the Los Angeles Dodgers from
1942 to 1950. He once said, “My father
was 86 when he died. As an old man he
was still planting peach and apple trees on our farm near Portsmouth , Ohio
I often think of Branch Rickey and his
father. At 86, I’m digging holes and planting
several lilac bushes along one side of our property. I may not live long enough to see them grow
tall enough to shield our privacy, but I assume I will. It’s called hope. Branch Rickey’s father understood that the
genius of gardening is hope. There is
always a tomorrow every time a gardener plants a seed, a bush, or a tree, and it’s
the loss of tomorrow where many people, at whatever age, go astray. They’re spiraling in yesterday’s squirrel
cage. Going nowhere or even backwards, they
live without anticipation, a life of boring “same olds.”
On contrast, some social scientists,
called “futurists,” think that they know the future. The three witches in Macbeth were far more
reliable. Since the only thing we know
is the past, the “futurists” talk about nothing at all, a fact that doesn’t
seem to dissuade them, resulting in a particularly boring kind of science
fiction, rivaling economics. We all
stand “upon this bank and shoal of time,” as Macbeth said, trying to see beyond the horizon into
the future’s unknown.
Hope
isn’t knowledge, but rather anticipation.
In contrast, that dreadful spiraling experience called depression amongst
other things is living without hope or anticipation. It afflicts people of all ages and isn’t
solely an affliction of the aged. One of
the reasons that gardening is so beneficial to the human experience is that it
is based on hope, an anticipation of a tomorrow.
Just
a short drive around town proves the point.
A gaggle of dismal young people gathered on a street corner or in a city
park smoking cigarettes and pot, drinking rot gut, and talking about nothing in
particular, all reassuring themselves that life is barely worth living. I see them on my way to the main library
where I tutor with The Literacy Center three times a week.
Then
there is some old fart up to his ankles in dirt and muck having the time of his
life caring for several rows of corn or carefully tending his roses. He has fewer years ahead of him, but he’s joyful
because he has hope. Understanding the
contrast is a no-brainer. It has to do
with planting a seed. The gardener
always expects to eat the corn or smell the roses.
Gardening
isn’t a rational, scientific endeavor, as are botany and horticulture. They like facts and figures, charts and
graphs, what will work and what won’t, and, especially, hierarchical classifications,
all in faux Latin and Greek. Useful,
they keep gardeners from wasting time and money trying things that won’t work. However, they’re observers and commentators
on gardening, statisticians, not lovers.
Intimately
involved, gardeners feel their gardens are extensions of themselves. They feel and touch their plants, even
caressing them and speaking to them. It’s
not an objective experience but an intimate one. They relish the feeling of soil drifting
through their fingers, as they plant a seed early in the spring or dig holes, full
of hope that they will flower or bear fruit.
It’s an existential and spiritual experience rather than a rational
scientific one because it’s a hope grounded in faith. Faith isn’t knowledge but an assumption that
breeds anticipation. It, also, begets
joy.
Martin
Luther, the great theologian of the 16th century who set faith free
from authoritarian repression, wrote:
“Even if I knew that tomorrow
the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2013
Dana Prom Smith and Freddi Steele edit Gardening Etcetera for the Arizona
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