In My Autumn Garden

Where we live, autumn has arrived dressed in cool, damp wind. Perfect weather for my black Russian soul. So I write these words and send them to you . . .


“To everything there is a season,” says Ecclesiastes. “And a time for every purpose under heaven.” The poetry in these familiar words is unmistakable, but so are the generalities. Everything -- season -- time -- purpose.

Now, if we’re free to choose a specific thing for which there is a specific time and season, I nominate White-Shoes-Are-Declasse-After-Labor-Day. But such trivialities (concrete though they may be . . .) are surely not what Kohelet -- the biblical bard -- had in mind. For the text continues, “A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted.” Ah, good. Our melancholy poet-teacher has stopped beating around the bush. This is life and mortality we’re talking about. This is the bittersweet process of looking back, looking inward and looking ahead as we age. And on this journey through my autumn garden, Kohelet -- and a seed catalog -- are my chosen guides.

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When I was young, spring arrived with fists full of lilies of the valley. They grew in clumps near the back door of my parents' house, and even more than robins or the crocus that pushed its way up through the snow, fragrant lilies of the valley meant spring to me.

My mother loved lilies of the valley. She understood their preference for shade, their need to shun bright light. She approved of the modest green capes in which the tiny blossoms wrapped themselves. At the time, our family owned an impressive collection of empty Kraft Cheese Spread glasses (from pimento and olive, mostly), and mother often filled the glasses with lilies of the valley and arranged the bouquets around our duplex -- on the kitchen table, the dining room buffet, the window sill above her sewing machine. The blooms never lasted long. No matter how often we changed the water, the bell-shaped flowers soon drooped on their delicate necks, bowed their heads, and died. But the plants returned, every spring, to our garden. And why not? After all, seed catalogs promise that lilies of the valley -- when well rooted -- will spread indefinitely, need almost no care, and live for many years.

*

When I was young, summer arrived on the ruffled skirts of hollyhocks which grew in sturdy rows beside our wooden backyard fence. Even more than monarch butterflies or morning glories scrambling up the porch rail, hollyhocks meant summertime to me.

The hollyhocks stood taller than I. The flowers -- pink, peach, red, white -- big as saucers, sheer as tissue paper -- hung like Lilliputian dresses at an outdoor bazaar. In my hands the blooms morphed into brides with their attendants, princesses surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, a line of headless ballerinas. In my summer garden, make-believe grew real as hollyhocks, but by September the flowers had gone to seed. Not to worry. Horticulturists say hollyhocks are a robust lot, and once established will last a long time.

*

Soon the short days of autumn will be here, with asters, goldenrod and mums blooming through chilly wind, frost and the first snow. But eventually we must deadhead the plants, rake up twigs and leaves, renew depleted soil. We’ll cast away stones, gather stones together, and put our gardens to bed for the winter -- our hopes for renewal waiting like seeds in the earth.

Today, however, I remember a trip Don and I took to Holland some years ago. In a village near the Zuider Zee we visited a tulip farm where acres of cut tulips were piled in heaps -- luminous purple, blue, orange, crimson, yellow, green -- like splendid dead parrots. While the cut blossoms lay unattended, workers gently placed the tear-shaped bulbs in burlap bags for shipment overseas. The flowers would be burned and plowed back into the earth. “This process may seem heartless,” the tulip farmer said, “but the transient beauty of young flowers is less prized than the enduring wisdom in the bulb.”

*

“One generation goes, another comes,” says Ecclesiastes, and to rail against this certainty is a waste of precious time. Unlike hollyhocks or lilies of the valley, our seasons will not last indefinitely or even (in some cases) many years. This autumn I ask, who will tend my garden when I’m gone? Perhaps the answer -- and some comfort -- lies in these words from a seed catalog:

“Mature tulip bulbs produce offset buds that are clones of the parent bulb, endowed with the same characteristics and genetic code. Nourished by the mother bulb, offsets grow into daughter bulbs, and the original mother shrivels and slowly disappears. When separated from the mother bulb, the young bulbs start flowering themselves, and even if planted upside down, they instinctively turn, turn, turn and grow towards the sun.”

Copyright © 2007 Ozzie Nogg. All rights reserved.

The Circle That Is Simchat Torah

Every year on Simchat Torah, we march with scrolls and flags around the synagogue, read of Moses’ death, finish the Book of Deuteronomy, and then -- without pause -- start the Torah cycle over again with Bereshit and the Creation story.

This seamless segue can affect me in various ways, depending on my mood.

If my world is in balance, then the rhythmic progression from ending to beginning feels logical -- even comforting. If I’m hurting, this life-goes-on-in-spite-of-everything stuff strikes me as the Ultimate Cosmic Cliché. And if I’m bone weary, the unbroken circularity makes me ache for a time out.

But the world (thank you, Broadway) will not stop and let me get off. Still, when I look closely at the text we read on Simchat Torah, I realize there is a way to at least put things on hold.

Come with me.

* * * *

It is said that God created man in His image, yet none of us resemble any other. Furthermore, in one of the many midrashim based on the Creation story, we are told that while God was creating this world, He simultaneously created countless smaller worlds -- a metaphor (perhaps) for Mankind.

Imagine it! Zillions of people -- zillions of small worlds -- each spinning in separate orbits. Sometimes we spin out of control and collide. Sometimes we spin so far away we lose sight of one another, of God and the wonders He created for us.

Nachman of Bratslav commented on this. “Just as your hand, held before your eyes, can hide the tallest mountains -- so this earthly life can keep you from seeing the vast radiance that fills the universe.”

But even as our individual worlds keep spinning, we can find a way -- and the time -- to see the radiance of the universe. All we need do is take our hands from our eyes and read the opening verses of Bereshit.

From the text we learn -- as we learn every Simchat Torah -- that after God spent six days creating the heavens and earth and all they contained, He brought into being His crowning achievement -- the Shabbat. The day that He blessed and called holy, and on which He rested from all the work He had made.

Shabbat, says our tradition, is a gift from God. It is a day of sweetness, peace and delight -- when the cares and troubles of the past week are forgotten and we can rest, rejoice and be happy.

The prophet Jeremiah said, “Take heed of the Sabbath, for the sake of your souls.” If, during the year, we forget this teaching, we can thank Simchat Torah for reminding us that Shabbat is a taste of the world to come -- a quiet haven when this world is too much with us.

* * * *

Another Simchat Torah lesson.

According to the Psalms, in the Beginning, before He created any thing or any body, God created Wisdom. And this Wisdom, said the rabbis, was Torah. And, reasoned the rabbis, if God created the Torah before all else, He must have done so for a purpose. That purpose, they said, was so God could have a blueprint upon which to build the world.

A midrash teaches that the Torah itself declared, “A human king builds a palace not according to his own ideas but according to the ideas of an architect. And the architect needs parchment on which to draw the plans for the rooms and entrances. I am God’s architect,” said the Torah, “and so did God look into me and, accordingly, create the world.”

Now, if God looked into the Torah and followed its wisdom in the act of Creation, it seems logical that we -- cast in His image -- should do the same.

But how?

If the idea suits you, go march and dance and follow the scrolls around the synagogue in the Simchat Torah hakafot. Then, when the festival is over, continue to follow the wisdom of Torah. Make it the blueprint for building your personal world.

Sound too ambitious? Then let’s reframe the suggestion. During the coming year, treat your family, your friends, employees and pets with kindness. Be kind to the earth. (Be kind to yourself, too.) Visit the sick. Offer hospitality. During the coming year, stay close to your dear ones. Do no harm.

And when you can, stop (hello, Shabbat) to marvel, rejoice and be grateful for the radiant universe that God began for us -- Bereshit!


Copyright © 2007 Ozzie Nogg. All rights reserved.