Hortus Canticum
“Si hortum in bibliotheca habes, nihil deerit.
(if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need)”
The sounds of this place always bring me back. I always wondered how the bees found the same flowers again and again, or how the same black and yellow spider spins her stained glass window between trellises of tomatoes that always manifest differently from year to year. Something about this place calls out to those who would know it. Something primal that appeals to the broken spaces in the soul. For me, it’s tinkling wind chimes and rustling leaves. It’s the sound of a gust of wind and the humm of a thousand fluttering things.
I have known music in my life—beautiful music. The kind that prickles the skin and sends shivers down the back. I have made such music myself. I have shed tears in acoustically pristine sanctuaries as the interwoven fabric of a hundred clear voices blanketed an awestruck house. I have witnessed the transcendent power of such music, the kind that heals people. I have laid my head on the ivories as a song from my own throat ripped my voice from me, gutted me, hurt me.
I have known the magnanimous trance of organized music, notes stacked carefully one on top of the other in pursuit of overtones or tears or worship. But the music my garden makes sweeps me up into its arms and welcomes me home.
She needs no tuning, no practice, no assistance or meddling by humans. She is an organ unto herself, vibrating of her own accord, from her ragged fortissimo staccato in a storm, or the legato piano of a breezy summer afternoon. Each color a melody, each shade of green and gold a thematic ribbon shimmering from seasons past.
In the spring, the earth drones a low, thumping, dissonant pedal tone as I break her open and sow my hopeful seeds. I feel the tempo increase as I press my dirty hands against her, praying hope over her will. The baseline splits as tiny green sprouts pierce through the field of dark ochre and peaty charcoal, the first blessed harmony of the season.
As the rain beats a rhythm across the delicate little things, I watch and wait, anxious for the flowers and the fruit. I press my face against my window, willing the song to continue. But if you rush the movement, you miss the rise. And anyone who’s ever written a concerto knows the value of a crescendo. From those first little green stems bud leaves of larger and larger size. First from a single tendril, and then up the trellises, reaching higher and higher and higher, climbing, stretching, bursting, first with leaves then buds. As the air warms and the nights grow shorter, the sun joins the melody and lends an aria to the score, harkening her clerics closer to her shining face. She burns brighter, her voice ever louder, until her song drowns out everything but the illustrious arrival of the main event.
As those first, most beautiful flowers break through the curtain of green, the orchestra drops away, the soundscape cleared for the dramatic moment. Each petal is its own song, flicking out from its pistil, opening into the choir. As each day passes, more voices are added, more melodies, more variety and movement until something like cacophony occurs.
But just as I am ready to take my gloves off and go back inside, just as I am tired of the sweat and the weeds and the work, just as my ears forget the beauty of that early spring music, a pianissimo breeze approaches from a northern front. A reminder of the penultimate phrase quickly approaching. As I carry heavy-laden baskets into my silent home, I curse the heat and the blaring hateful ego of the sun. The season continues on, her song still as lovely as it was in Eden, her descendo having begun, so subtle I nearly always miss it in my haste to be rid of the repetitive chorus of summer.
And just as quickly as she arrived, the leaves of the tomatoes begin to brown and curl, a soft oboe changing the key. The night comes sooner and sooner—the creeping final theme of the piece, weaving itself into the melody, changing it right under my nose.
One by one I pull the remains of summer from the garden’s breast, plucking and raking, the lethargic sigh of autumn a section of violins finished counting rests. This slow death continues until one night, always too soon, something like a howl overtakes the earth. The frigid cry of winter whips the webs of the spiders away, dries the delicate petals of the roses, and closes the evening. The garden’s song ends as it always must end: in a silent night of hoary frost.
There are songs to be heard in winter, sure, but none so sweet as those first spring melodies. None so lovely as the pluck of a strawberry or the arias of summer birds accompanied by the whistle of an incoming storm. There is no music like it anywhere. Nothing made by Man comes close to it, nothing so sweet or heartbreaking. And yet, so many find themselves deaf to it, bombarded by synthetic bumps made of 1’s and 0’s, soulless hollow wails distilled and cultured by corporations whose greed creates vast swaths of earth where no songs are sung by garden or beast. It is the great tragedy of our age, so enamored by our own clacking tongues that we can’t hear the majesty of our home, the intricate concertos singing to us, asking nothing in return for our pleasure.
It is because of this deafness, this willing abstinence from the primeval drumming of the natural world, this need for sameness and comfort that forsakes the bounty for requiring rest, that dooms us. It is only by listening that we may find our way again. It is only by finding stillness, by enduring the long winter and awaiting the rain in spring that we may course correct and find peace. Because in music, as in all art, humans may find an echo of themselves and heal; and a healed man is a blessing on the earth, a maestro with baton raised, stewarding the song for all to hear and be made new by it.
And so I sit in my own garden, my own little orchestra of zinnias, cow peas, okra, and tomatoes. I sit and listen and smile and feel myself grounded by her beauty until the great nightly chorus of frogs and crickets take up their strings and usher in the stars and fireflies. Tonight I stay here a long while, caught up in the magic of this ordinary place, deeply grateful for its lessons and harvests.
Until the mosquitos arrive and I return to my cloister, humming to my basket as I walk.
