GOD’SCORNER

NATURE IS NOT ALWAYS the idyllic state poets would have us believe. At the moment winter and spring are feuding. Winter doesn’t want to let go; spring wants to come in. Winter is no longer the handsome Norseman creating a scintillating diamond-studded wonderland. This is an Old Man Winter, weary of his own buffeting winds and biting cold, tenaciously hanging on to his power. Spring is a sunny, silly young thing teasing the old man in a calculated attempt to wear him out and get rid of him.

Many react irritably to nature’s idiosyncrasies, but not so a friend whom I found seated at her dining room table, surrounded by seed catalogues. She is an outstanding gardener each of whose fingers must be a green thumb. From deliciously tender asparagus through a long list of vegetables to luscious raspberries and strawberries, to flower

by Gertrude M. Puelicher

beds that are the envy as well as joy of all recipients of her beautifully arranged bouquets, she paces her life as wife and mother through the medium of her garden. In late winter she plans it, in spring and summer she spends endless backbreaking hours tending it, in fall she reaps the harvest, cans it and stores it away for winter use.

Her philosophy of life is the result of her living and working with growing things, with the invisible life within the seed, the life that has its source in God consciousness. Hers is really a contemplative meditation that results in a rarely ruffled kindliness and serenity. “It’s just that I don’t let myself be burdened with thinking mean things about people,” she says. “When you let what people do or say disturb you, then that makes a load you have to carry. It’s like a burden on your back that gets heavier and heavier. I’m just not going to be burdened with something I can avoid. There’s so much to be thankful for, and when I’m working in my garden, even though I get physically tired, I’m thinking kind thoughts about everybody.”

Analyze that philosophy, and you find it is clear detachment from any unpleasant situation or thought. The marvelous effect of such detachment is complete freedom, a freedom available to you and me as we turn from the human picture that is usually distorted, to that inner Self, the life of us as it is of the seed. The Nazarene carpenter recognized the power of that inner Self. “He that is within you is greater than he that is in the world” was the law that governed him. As you and I dwell in the power of the Spirit within us, so do we bring forth, regardless of untoward weather conditions or disturbing personal problems, an impersonal love for all mankind that gives us dominion and sets us free. n