Risen Awareness
Yesterday I was playing in the dirt. I was gardening, which is to say that after sleeping in (waking up at an unusually late 8am) and walking with Kim and Betty just to get the lotion from the motion benefit, I had a few errands to run (excess recycled cardboard is an extraordinary burden in retirement for some odd reason) and then decided I needed to tend to my garden. You see, later today I have engaged a garden design specialist recommended to me by neighbor Melisa, who has been watching her YouTube videos for several years. This is a local woman who uses all the same plants we have on this hilltop and is an equally big user of stone in various forms. That makes her sort of an anonymous soulmate of mine since i came to the same material conclusions when I started dabbling in this garden several years ago. Melisa recognized this and sat me down to watch one of her videos. I was impressed and felt like I liked the woman’s unassuming manner and her aesthetic eye, not to mention her noticeable knowledge of the horticulture of our region. So I texted her and asked for a consultation, which she agreed to at her normal price, and we set the meet for later today.
Like most people who have a housekeeper or maid service, cleaning up before the help gets here is an old tradition. It probably stems from some sense of pride that doesn’t want the help to know just how messy we are, but it probably also has something to do with the awareness that such a visit gives us as to how much more we could do for ourselves if we just took the time and expended the energy. My gardening foray yesterday was not so unusual in that I spend some time in the garden every day, but almost always do so in the morning when my energy level is greatest. I rarely go down the back hillside in the late afternoon, and yet several reasons compelled me to do so yesterday. The first was that I knew I had some business this morning to take care of and that might derail my early morning planting. I also had two large purple fountain grass plants and six succulents called Calandrinia Grandiflora to plant. When my last garden consultant was here (the consulting arborist), I was told to keep plants away from the base of my award-winning Queensland Bottle Tree. I dutifully took all the purple fountain grass out from immediately around it and did what I rarely do, which was to save them for replanting down on the back hillside. Only half of them survived the winter, which is why I rarely do that, but I bought several new ones to replace the dead ones and keep the configuration around the Joshua Tree metal sculpture in tact. Last week when I bought the Calandrinia I placed them at the base of the bottle tree only to have Kim admonish me to not plant anything there for want of arboreal chastisement. So, I figured I had better find a home for both the fountain grass and the Calandrinia before the new consultant shows up today. I would rather say, “I planted such-and-such”, rather than the subtlety of saying, “I had such-and-such planted”, implying that my gardener Joventino’s hand was in the game. Gardening can be such a psychologically taxing endeavor.
As I was down on the lower back hillside with my cart, shovel and eight potted plants, I was reminded of why I tend to stay off the back hillside in the late afternoon. At that exact spot, where the ten-foot-high Joshua Tree metal sculpture stands, there is a coyote runway, as I like to call it. This is the spot where coyotes travel across the ravines to get from one area to another. It is sort of the entry spot from the wilds of the lower ravine, where nobody lives and few people choose to traipse (thus, real coyote-only territory) and the more inhabited yards and hillsides, mine being the first at this spot. In the span of five minutes, two large coyotes ran right past me to the right and down the rock face that I have so nicely adorned with some artwork of Southwestern cacti. To me it is art. To one visitor it looked like graffiti. To the coyotes it is just another rock. One coyote ran down towards the neighbor’s gazebo, perhaps looking for rabbits and ground squirrels. The other ran right up my freshly de-weeded gravel path, past the Hobbit House playhouse and up to the neighbor’s house where they have three dogs. One of those dogs is a new Doberman who replaced a small pup that the coyotes took last summer before the neighbors got used to the evening carnivore warfare on the hilltop. That coyote who went that way probably feels he needs to test out the new Doberman’s commitment to protecting his two remaining little brothers.
After getting my plants in the ground and laying on more water than they probably needed (I am an incessant overwaterer), I headed back up to the house, thinking that this late afternoon gardening thing was not as bad as I thought so long as the coyotes know to keep their distance from me. I felt that I deserved a late afternoon movie of the sort Kim wouldn’t like, since there are a goodly number of those and she is busy with Betty at that time of day. I hit on one with Joseph Fiennes, brother of the great Ralph, playing a Roman Centurion stationed in Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago. The opening scene is of a hillside battle on landscape that didn’t look so very different than my back hillside (at least the version of that without the added watering). The narration identified it as the Judaean Desert and the scene looked very reminiscent of the lower hillside of Masada, where the Zealots defended their plateau against the Roman army using sticks and stones and whatever they could throw down on them. The movie is called Risen, which confused me until I realized it was in an array of Easter movies offered up by Prime. The next scene explained all that as the Centurion walked into the stone palace to meet with his boss, Prefect Pontius Pilate. This was the story of the post-crucifixion period when Christ was finding his way back to the world of the living and the Romans, goaded by the local Jewish leadership, were trying to be sure that this supposed Messiah did not achieve martyrdom on their watch by doing something crazy like coming back from the dead.
The Centurion goes to Golgotha, where the three crosses were placed with their three criminals undergoing punishment and the small band of onlookers there to witness the ordeal. The filmmakers did a good job of recreating the Biblical story, but making it seem very realistic in how a provincial place like Jerusalem might handle such an event when none of the historical solemnity was yet in the books and it was just another story of crime and punishment, extreme as it might seem to us now. The Centurion, who is too senior to be directly involved with the act of finishing off the criminals, does actually look into the eyes of the dead Jesus and sees that he is, indeed, dead.
That is the set-up for what is basically the next several days of burying him, neglecting the tomb (several thirsty Roman Legionnaires to blame), finding the tomb empty on Sunday morning, investigating the disappearance by questioning the Messianic disciples, and then, finally, being in the presence of a very much alive and resurrected Jesus Christ. This is all seen through the eyes of the Centurion, who goes from being an pagan, educated yet tough noble warrior, to a confused and spiritually-shaken believer who knows not where to turn next.
I always put myself into character in the movies I watch and yesterday I was the Centurion. The back hillside is my battlefield and gardening is my spiritual frontier. The miracle of nature can only be explained at a spiritual level. You put things in the ground, add water and the sun does the rest. My natural awareness has arisen.