(Summer Friends campers working in the Garden of Forgiveness at Stuyvesant Square Park)

Last Monday I worked in the Stuyvesant Square Park Garden of Forgiveness with "Summer Friends" - a summer camp group associated with Friends Seminary, the school that started this beautiful Garden of Forgiveness in NYC. It was so exciting the see how hard these young people (ages 9-13) worked! And with what enthusiasm and passion! Their task for the day was to spread mulch around the garden, so as to prevent weeds from cropping up and to keep the moisture in the soil for the health of the current plants growing in the garden.

It struck me how much work goes into tending and taking care of a garden. To keep it healthy and flourishing there must be a lot of work done. If only we could view ourselves similarly: that to keep our bodies and souls healthy, we must tend and take care of ourselves with the same concern, attention, tenderness and care. We have to look out for weeds of bitterness and anger, and lay a groundwork of forgiveness so they keep from spreading, choking off the life and beauty of the rest of the garden.

Recently, we had to take care of a fungus that was on our rododendrum. The fungus left black spots on the leaves and stems, and it took a lot of careful work to cut off the infected parts, and treat the rest of the plant with fungicide. As I did this, I thought of how much more seriously we might take our tendency to hold anger, greivances, and bitterness if it showed up on our bodies like a fungus! It certainly wreaks havoc on our bodies, and souls, if left unchecked (as Dr. Fred Luskin has shown in his research). As Nelson Mandela said, resentment is "like drinking a glass of poison and waiting for your enemies to die." But we often don't see the damage to ourselves as it's being done. If we could, we might just be a little quicker to forgive!

It's amazing how healing gardening can be - and how many ways it serves as a metaphor for forgiveness!

(Submitted by C. Ritter)







(Me next to some of our beautiful plants!)