Shmita in the garden

This year, I let my garden go. Partially because I assumed (correctly) I’d be moving over the summer and partly due to energy and time. This year I planted nothing. And yet. This year my garden is filled with green. I have lettuce literally bursting out of my garden beds growing giant heads. Cosmo flowers and lettuce both jumped my garden to seed themselves into the cracks in the sidewalk and are pushing up into the world, growing strong.

I had heard of letting the land lie fallow as part of Jewish tradition before, as part of Shmita, a way of letting the earth rest and trusting in God to provide. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I let my own garden lie fallow, that the earth would not rest by doing nothing, but by growing in its own way according to its own desires. Resting did not equal unproductive by any means. It just meant productive in a way that was outside of my desires and control.

As my daughter moves further into toddlerhood and closer to childhood I have practiced this very idea in my parenting more and more. Parenting sounds so active – teaching, directing, talking, correcting. But I have found so many moments in which doing less was the best course of action. Just as the land needs time to rest, so do children. They need time to integrate all the things they’ve learned and to practice the ones that are important to them, not just to their caregivers. Sure, I could coach my toddler through every step of getting dressed. Or I could make breakfast while she does it herself and find that the backward pants and inside out shirt are very minor compared to her sense of pride.

There’s often the desire to make things happen faster, go exactly right or look a certain way. When I was a teacher, I would sometimes have to hold my own hands clasped behind my back to keep myself from fixing something. I could have made the change in a second, but that would have robbed my students of their own thought process, their own experimentation and their own learning. It also robs them of their own sense of capability and pride.

I wonder if part of the reason the lettuces are doing so well this year is that they have been allowed the time and space for their own experimentation and change. Perhaps part of being a caretaker of gardens or people is holding your own hand while watching the change happen before your very eyes. So much of care is making space so that others may bloom in their own way.

In “The Gardener and the Carpenter,” Alison Gopnik a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley writes, “Being a parent is like making a garden. It’s about providing a rich, stable, safe environment that allows many different kinds of flowers to bloom.” And sometimes, I would argue, it is about letting the garden plant itself, letting some plants go to seed at the end of their life cycles to see what they might do next. Letting the garden get messy and wild so that it can create another iteration of itself in the next year.

The carpenter Gopnik refers to is the parent who tries to build their child into what they want while the gardener creates the conditions for becoming. Both are creative acts, building something new out of the sum of the parts, but gardening is working with life itself, the living, growing earth, while carpentry is building out of inert matter. Both have value and create important things. One with rulers and precision and one with observation and trial and error.

As I watch my garden grow itself this year, I am delighted by its resilience and its desire to exist in all the spaces it can find for itself to flourish. This is what I want for my daughter too, a sense that the world is bigger than the place she first grew and that she has the ability and creativity to grow in the unlikeliest of places, in the moments of abundance. I want her to know that some of the most important things in her life will happen when it’s quiet and calm and that though the fields may lie fallow that doesn’t mean they are empty of life.

SARAH GREENLEAF (sgreenleaf@jewishallianceri.org) is the digital marketing manager for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and writes for Jewish Rhode Island.