planting a garden

I sit in the silence, waiting to hear from a voice I hope will come. It seems like I am constantly writing about waiting in quiet patches of starlight, but here I am again. This time it’s on a Sunday night, on a couch that isn’t mine, wondering my big questions into the stillness of the house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where I am living for the summer.

Everywhere I go, I am constantly sowing prayers into the floors, and tonight, I wonder how many other people planted their own prayers into this same borrowed room. Did they also sit here, on their couch, watching the setting sun slip through the blinds and turn the room a soft golden, hoping against hope to hear something worthwhile? In the two lovely months I got to live in this beautiful home, already there is practically a garden of hope sprouting up everywhere—tomato plants of worries and raspberry bushes of tiny delights and wildflowers of every kind of gratitude.

As I sit in this garden of my own dreams, listening to the actual chorus of birds that literally never stop singing outside this second story unit (it really feels like a treehouse!), I’m watching the way these seeds bloomed in ways I didn’t expect.

For those of you who don’t know, I spent all of 2021 writing one haiku per day. It was a really profitable exercise for my own writing practice and skill, but also an incredible record of the wrestlings of my heart. Yesterday, I spent an hour reading through all 113 pages of them, and was struck by the way my heart has grown into a living, breathing place with grass and trees and wind chimes and birds.

I read through hopes I still harbor and the fears I don’t, the prayers that felt unanswerable, and the laments that continue to weave their way through my journal. They seemed to spring out of my computer, arranging themselves all around me as a breathing, active reminder of the ways I have been carried through each room of my heart—a holy trail of sacred places behind me.

In my theater in college, we played a game called “this is the place where.” The point of the game as I understood it was to practice specificity, to place yourself back in a certain moment in time, remembering what it felt like to be there, in your body, heart and mind, and then tell about it.

As I read through the haikus, it felt like playing that game with myself. I was able to look back and think “this is the place where” I was working through it, could do nothing except lament, was grateful, was in love, was so sick and tired of being afraid.

And as I looked at those sacred moments from almost a year’s distance, it was as if God was saying “these are the places I was with you.”

How I love the idea of God entering into our ordinary life, the reality that God is near us even in the thick silence where we wonder and weep. That when we least expect it, God tells us “you aren’t afraid of that anymore,” and by some miracle, it’s true.

God has done such a profound work in my heart over the last few years, in spite of the ways that I look God square in the face, almost every day, and say, “are you really going to show up this time?” And instead of God becoming frustrated, I imagine a knowing smile as God’s wordless, gentle response. As if to say, “Just wait a bit longer.” As if to say, “Look. I’ve already come.”

I feel like my twenties have been a constant series of crossroads in which I am ever having to make decisions (my worst nightmare) about the trajectory of my life. To stay, to go, to stay, to go, to stay, to go, to go back. Over and over. And each time, I worry: what if the seeds I plant will not grow? What if, this time, God doesn’t come? It reminds of me this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver:

And so, I am here, again, learning how to trust at the crossroads and how to trust that quiet voice behind me saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.” Still, despite everything, I have such trouble remembering all of this. I forget so quickly the gracious way I have been carried, the way God has walked with me through fears and through tragedy and through joy. When I arrive at a threshold, as I am now, as I will again and again as I journey through this growing up, why do I pay more attention to the Liar’s whispers than the constant presence of my God?

I wrote in a haiku last year:

This is my prayer again tonight, as the sun has set and left me in the darkness again. Why are the doubts sticky and the truth so hard to affirm? Why can’t I believe what I know is true?

In the really great AppleTV show Ted Lasso, the titular character Ted, a kind and perpetually optimistic goofball who is brought in from America to coach a down-on-their-luck-and-themselves football (soccer) team in England. He realizes that the team’s primary issue is that they don’t believe in themselves or each other, so he hangs up a poster that says BELIEVE. He taps the poster all the time as a reminder to himself, and as a reminder to the men on his team to persist and to trust.

We could all use a believe sign in the garden of our hearts, I think. I hung one up in my classroom here in Pittsburgh, and I think I will make one everywhere I go/work/teach/write/act from now on.

I wonder, where are signs that remind us to hold the belief tightly to our chest? What are the little notes, sacred records, we can leave for ourselves both to remind us to believe, and to remind us of the way we have been taken care of, by God and each other? Where is God kneeling beside us, watching the seeds we’ve planted sprout up into something beautiful, even when we are pretty sure the seeds will never actually grow?

Friends, belief has the power to shape everything—it changes the way we look and the way we listen, the way we sow and the way we harvest, the way we weep and the way we love. I don’t have an answer for you about why it’s so hard to believe things deep in your soul even when your mind knows them to be true. But I do know that believing is something we have to practice, both as we take conscious time to reflect, and as we feel ourselves slipping into the depths of despair. Believing is an affirmative reply to the lies that slide in and say “did God really say…

that you are taken care of?

that you are enough?

that you are beloved?

that you are not alone?”

Everything seems to distill down to this: we are not alone, despite the lies and the weeds. After all, look at how we have been carried all this way. Therefore, we can believe with hope.

As I prepare for the next season in my life yet again, I am so grateful for the community that has come around me, encouraging me to open my fists and let the seeds inside slip into the soil. That believed in me even when I did not. That sowed prayers into their floors and walls for me, and added their prayers to mine. That witnessed me in each moment of transition and growth.

In these last summer months, may we notice the growth happening around us right where we are, and hold on to it as evidence that this is not the end. That our fears will fade and our strength will grow. That we are accompanied by invisible prayers that root down alongside us. May we all sit down in the soil of our home, messy and wild and covered in dirt, and plant a garden. And as we watch the garden sprout from the floor, may we give up worrying and instead carry our bodies out into the morning and sing.

-alyssa

p.s. I have the immense privilege of writing for my church in Boise, Redemption Hill, and for the mindful faith app, Dawn, among other things. I’ve written three pieces lately that have echoes in this essay, if you want more on any of this. Here is one on believing, one on planting seeds of peace, and one on trust.

p.p.s. I also get to do some writing for SolidCreative.Media, a creative design studio where we help passionate small businesses, non-profits and churches create world-changing brands. If you or someone you know needs a guide through the weeds of rebranding, we are currently on the look-out for new clients. You can message me here and I’ll get you connected!

questions, unanswered

a patient gardener