gardening as mythological quest
by lavinia plonka

Well, maybe I’m making too big of a thing out of it. After all, there are few things more mundane than raking pine needles.

Out there surgeons are replacing hearts, small governments in Africa are overthrowing each other, Bruce Willis is making another 100 million dollar movie, and I’m in the front yard, raking 6 years worth of pine needles off the ground because I finally admitted that they don’t decompose and instead are a fertile breeding ground for oceans of poison ivy that grasp onto the tines of my rake as I struggle to reclaim yet another patch of my neglected property from the second law of thermodynamics. What is great nature’s real intention? I mean what earthly purpose does poison ivy serve anyway except to remind humanity of the repercussions of inattention? I sit here now, trying not to scratch my arms and legs, staring at the lurid blisters marking my skin like dark continents on a pale sea, payment for the temerity to struggle with entropy. And yet…..

It begins as many an ordeal begins, innocently enough with the notion of a small “project.” This winter’s storms have cost us several trees, and not a few branches of the majestic white pine that graces our front yard. For years I have ignored any landscaping chores around the tree, allowing its grandeur to compensate for the rising tangle below it. Now I haul the huge broken boughs to the woods out back, evoking in my overactive imagination images of Egyptian slaves toiling with the pyramid blocks. I can’t help but notice a myriad of broken sticks and fragile thin branches crunching under my feet. Perhaps I should pick them up.

I fill a tarp with these branches, and to my growing horror, discover there are more lurking under the needles, beckoning behind the menacing shine of thriving poison ivy leaves. Well, let’s just clean the whole sucker up, I think. How long could it take? For about an hour, I rake, filled with the vitality of someone engaging in honest labor. Like a maid in a Brueghel painting, I heave my arms, wipe my forehead with sweat, tear at the vines and make an astounding ring of piles around the tree.

Many trips to our dumping area in the back later, I survey the ground. There are still more pine needles. I have missed a spot here and there. And in a couple of areas it appears I haven’t raked deeply enough, I have merely uncovered more layers of pine needles. Determined now to turn this suddenly integral part of my yard into a suburban paradise, I rake another ring of piles, equally as huge as the first, if not greater. Now staggering as I drag the tarp to the swamp, I carry on an inner conversation. “Good Lord, I’m never gonna get done. There’s another layer of pine needles under this one. And not only that, but it really doesn’t look any different! OK, so the poison ivy is gone, but you haven’t killed the root system. It’ll be back the next time it rains. You could rake the pine needles for the rest of your life and never get ahead of it. You might as well give up now.”

Instead, when I return to the tree, I am seized by the insane resolve to continue this apparently pointless task. And suddenly I am struck by the image of Sisyphus, condemned forever to roll the rock up the hill. But of course, no one has condemned me to do this. And yet something in me feels compelled to repetitively engage in this apparently useless behavior.

Or is it so useless? I am startled to discover that underneath my complaining, I am also experiencing a perverse pleasure in the futility of my task. This could go on forever. And while I’m so engaged, there are no bills to pay, no social obligations, no business calls to make. I have no responsibility in life except to just keep raking and hauling, raking and hauling.

My mind becomes quieter and quieter, the endless inner conversation that forms the background of my daily freneticism fades away. Life used to be a series of just such repetitive tasks: washing clothes in a tub, pounding grain with a mortar, chopping wood, lugging water. Have we sacrificed something in our pursuit of modern convenience? When I finally finish, surveying the area with the kind of relaxed pleasure one feels after “a good day’s work,” I suddenly “see” the solution to a problem I have been worrying about for days. Kind of makes me wonder if Sisyphus was actually having a better time than we think.

 

Lavinia Plonka is a movement junkie. She spent 25 years performing and teaching mime around the world from the lofty heights of the Guggenheim Museum to the dubious distinction of being dubbed NYC’s “bar mitzvah queen”. Yoga, Aikido, Nia and The Feldenkrais Method® form her current course of study. Lavinia teaches The Feldenkrais Method privately and with groups in Asheville, as well as workshops nationwide. Her new book, What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living (Tarcher/Penguin) will hit book stores April 12. [ laviniaplonka.com ]