A Journey to Eden: Re-discovering the Path

Laying the original path        The results of our efforts
    Autumn 2004                            Summer 2005  ,,,,,,,,

My previous posting inspired me.  I’d found (and posted) pictures we’d taken back in 2004 when we first laid the flagstone for a meandering path in our front garden along with photos from the following summer when the garden had matured around the stone pathway. 

The path overgrown
Early summer 2011

I had forgotten how pretty it was, particularly as it had since become overgrown with crabgrass, ornamental strawberries, clover, dandelions, and the occasional thorny blackberry vine. Season after season, year after year, we neglected the path to the point where we became indifferent to the overgrowth. I just presumed the path was lost to the weeds and doomed forever by the so-called thug plants.  Why I thought that, I can’t say for certain, but such thinking was consistent with my state of mind: both the path and the energy & will to recover it were nowhere to be found.

What an apt allegory or metaphor for my spiritual life. Like my garden path, my spiritual journey has been a meandering one. It was laid on a foundation of Catholicism, but informed by wanderings on many diverse paths: born-again evangelical Christianity; Islam, New-Age Spiritualism; Wicca, and esoteric Judaism (Kabbalah), to name a few. I first became aware of having a deep spirit life around age 13 and from that time, my spiritual beliefs have been a wonderful source of energy, direction, and nurturing for me. There have been times over the years when both my faith and practices were strong and consistent. There have been other times when I was indifferent to my spiritual path, other concerns grew large and distracting, competing for my energy and attention to the point where they covered-up the path (or at a minimum, made it that much harder to tread on it).

Teaching a class on medical ethics

Such was the case up to recently. I've spent the past 14 years in an elite medical education environment and I can say without question that life in academia is demanding. As a romantic, it can be seen as the idyllic life of the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. And I have loved that aspect of it. Where else can you just simply think the largest thoughts you can imagine, discuss them with some of the smartest people, and even get paid for it? 


But in the trenches – the everydayness of the job – there is this relentless “up or out” imperative, this “publish or perish” mantra that shatters the romantic image, bringing out the worst in my colleagues and myself. The pressures are intense, particularly in elite institutions such as mine. In such environments you are measured "on the curve" and the curve is set by the successes of your peers: the Nobel laureates, the MacArthur geniuses, the Pioneer Awardees... It is a situation where being good enough somehow is never good enough. The expectations can sometimes feel inhuman. I was once told that if I am getting enough sleep at night, I am probably not working hard enough. Such a life can zap your energy (and will) and have you daily walking past the neglected, forgotten garden of your life and not even notice the garden or the path you are on.

There is an African proverb that says: To stumble is not to fall but rather to move forward quickly.

Last year was a hard year, a year of stumbling. But stumbling such that it led (thank God) to falling forward. It was at one of my lowest points that I realized that I had made a choice to live the life I was living – one full of stress with dubious rewards – and that I could choose something else. I declared to myself that in one year, 365 days, I would be in a new place, engaged in work where my God-given gifts and the skills and talents I've developed over the years would be perfectly matched. Even if my work circumstances wouldn't change, I would be (changed).


The story of Genesis – the Creation story – was the perfect allegory for the task ahead of me of re-creating myself. I named my process "My Journey to Eden," which would come to have multiple meanings (that I will share over time). But for now I will fast forward to the present. Next month I shall begin a year of training in Clinical Pastoral Education. I will be in a new place, engaged in God's work of becoming a spiritual companion for others.

The Task at Hand: Recovering the Neglected Pathway

This journey to Eden has returned me to gardening. This week, I undertook the task to recover the lost stone path. And in the process, I am affirming my own recovery.

Re-discovering My Path

How does my garden grow?

This is my fifth garden. Actually this is about the 3rd version of my fifth garden, but the first one here in Oakland where I am trying to become an urban farmer. As usual, this blog is an afterthought, after I've put in the first of many hours transforming a raggedy neglected (embarrassing) backyard in a valiant effort to create a food garden. If only I'd been organized beforehand, I'd have taken lots of before pictures. My verbal description will have to suffice for now...and tomorrow I'll take pics of the mid-way process and post them.

First, a little background. We bought our Rockridge home in 1998. The previous owners had paved over the entire back in concrete and built a series of huge decks that covered almost all of the small 600 square feet of space. They put a huge hot tub smack dab in the middle of the deck. And they surrounded the entire deck system with netting and fencing (meant to afford some privacy for the hot tubbers). We had no idea when we moved in that behind the deck there was this scrawny little tree that in our second year here produced a couple of lemons. But we couldn't access the lemons because the poor dear was choked behind the deck and netting and difficult to reach.

So three years after we moved in, we started a major remodel. The first to go was the tub and decks. What a wonderful surprise to find that it was a Meyer Lemon tree -- everbearing some of the most delicious lemons in nature. Freeing it from its prison must have made it happy. It is thriving and producing year round (with spring crops of up to 400 lemons). But this entry is not about the Meyer. It is about reclaiming nature from a concrete prison.

The next challenge we faced in the back was a wild blackberry bush. To someone who has never had one of those, you might think we are fortunate (visions of blackberry cobbler...mmm). But this is not a docile being. This is a Himalayan Blackberry - a vicious thorny critter that refuses to behave nicely. Remember, we had essentially abandoned the back yard our first few years here, so to imagine what happens when you neglect a yard with a Himalayan Blackberry bush, think about Sleeping Beauty's castle surrounded by a bramble of thorns. If you are a kinesthetic person, take a sharp pin and jam it into your arms, legs, or fingers...repeatedly and you'll get the idea. (Poor Sam, we put up a basketball hoop for him after we got rid of the hot tub and decks, but he could never play because the ball kept getting eaten by the bramble.) My husband has done battle with this bush for the past 12 years. It requires vigilance. At the moment, it is relatively tamed (ha! it's shown up in the front yard). My goal is to keep it under control, just enough to pick berries for food. Wish me luck and I will post my cobbler recipe once I am successful in taming it.

So now we have a concrete back yard, home to a Meyer lemon tree on a thin strip of soil and a thorny invasive monster. It also collects the junk we need to throw out. In fact, I'm determined to get all the hazardous waste (old paint, roofing tar, and various other toxic household liquids) that we've left out hauled out tomorrow to the Alameda County Household Hazardous Waste drop-off center.

Lastly, we have neglected both the front and back yards consistently over the years. I am just waiting for the producers from HGTV's Curb Appeal: The Block to show up and tell us we've been selected as the neighborhood eyesore. (Yes, we have no pride. Put us on the air and gladly work your magic.) I've put in 2 or 3 gardens in the front. And once or twice, it thrived so beautifully that I even got compliments. (Thank God for California wildflowers). But if we don't weed in February, (or March, April, May...) the crab grass (and Himalayan Blackberries) take over, as seen here. Yes this is our front yard (thanks to Google maps). And we often don't weed in February or any other month for that matter. It's a mess. Or, it was a mess. It will have it's own blog entry another day. This is about the back yard.

Or rather, this is about becoming inspired to create this blog after nearly putting my back out today in our back yard. And why am I starting a blog about my garden, when it's clear I have failed, ignored, avoided, and neglected our yards, front, side, and back for most of the 14 years we've lived here? It's because despite my actions (or inactions), I love gardening. I was smitten with the peonies and lilacs my grandfather planted in our family home in Cincinnati, Ohio and the loving care he put into so that I could have my first garden love affair. I have loved it from my very first solo garden in Nashville, Tennessee, when I dug up some grass in the back of my rented home and threw some green bean seeds in the ground without a clue of what I was doing. I loved the eco-unfriendly but first successful garden I planted in my home in the Arizona High-Desert, that shared the space with a rattlesnake and a couple of scorpions; and my fragrance garden (honeysuckle, lilacs, roses) in Glen Park (San Francisco) planted to mask odors from the pet porta-potty we constructed for our little beagle named RedHen; and now with the series of gardens here in Rockridge.

But really, I am starting this blog to celebrate that I am now able to live a lifestyle where I can garden. I am like the Meyer Lemon tree, freed after 14 years of bondage. Only what subdued me was not a deck or a fence. It was fourteen years of an 80 mile round-trip job commute that sucked the life energy from me. Last year I decided I'd had enough. I am starting a new life and this blog is my reflection on this new journey of Grace to my Garden of Eden.