inner healing and power tools...

One of the late-in-life blessings I am experiencing these days has to do with gardening and working with tools. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that for most of my life I neither had the time nor the interest in working with my hands. At an early age my dad said something to me like: "It's a good thing your quick on your feet and bright because you'd never be able to make a living working with your hands." He wasn't wrong. So as life matured, I organically spent more time in libraries and book stores than the power tool section of Sears or even our local hardware store. There are some pretty amusing stories of me trying to work on plumbing in Tucson, but they're for the cognoscenti only!

That said, I've always liked to do small crafts: in the early 70's I loved to do crewel stitch embroidery on my jeans. A few years back I started making small, wooden prayer beads. And I have long found solace tinkering in the garden, too. Last year I decided I would teach myself how to make some raised-bed garden terraces out of discarded, recycled wood. It was a totally beginner's mind, Zen experience with a LOT of mistakes and do-overs. But, in the end, I figured out how to craft two decent sized raised-bed terraces and grew some respectable vegetables throughout the summer. This year, after buying an electric chop saw, I was ready to up my game and tackle rebuilding the terraces. That, too, became a Zen event as I had to rebuild two of them twice. Same with the small flower boxes constructed out of recycled wood: let's say that measuring precisely was not originally my long suit. But I learned from my mistakes and did not begrudge having to try, try again - and again.

All the while I was doing this I found myself thinking of Gandhi's do-it-yourself weaving campaign in pre-liberation India. I studied Gandhi as a political science undergraduate and was long an advocate of his way of approaching social change. Not just his commitment to nonviolence, mind you, but also his dedication to healing the individual and collective imagination. In my own old, hippie, intellectual way, I did a little Gandhian healing myself with my garden. I have come to appreciate what it means to create something useful and reasonably attractive with my hands. Now, I have a LONG way to go before I consider myself anything close to competent. But the process of trying, failing, rethinking and rebuilding until I got it right gave me deep satisfaction. It was a wonderful way to be meditative during the lock down: being out in the spring sunshine, the cool wind, the silence, and the smell of freshly sawed wood was restorative.

This weekend we'll finally get the gladiola, iris and lily bulbs in the ground as well as the wild flower mix and sunflowers, too. Then it it on to experimenting with minor repairs on our 1950s wood frame house.