While staying with some friends in Tahlequah this evening I had a chance to get back into a garden for the first time in years. Green beans were ready, and they weren’t going to pick themselves. So in the relative cool of the evening I got my hands a little bit dirty and got the itchies on my legs, and it was such a great feeling. I haven’t taken the time to reconnect with the land since I was in the gardening project in 4-H. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say that I was at times a very reluctant gardener in my youth. (There’s a chance my parent’s might read this and call me on it otherwise…) Isn’t it interesting how the things we sometimes disdain in our youth are what we most yearn for in our maturity?
Before getting into the bean rows I had been doing some light reading: Real Peace, Real Security: The Challenges of Global Citizenship. It’s actually a short intro – only 128 pages and they’re even small compared to the standard paperback fare. So far it’s an enlightening read, looking into the challenges of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding, and I hope by the end, will offer some good insights for a religious-minded fellow like me.
After an evening in the book and in the garden, I’m reminded of a line from the film Gladiator, where General Maximus reminisces on his home plantation in saying “dirt washes off easier than blood.” It’s something of a memorable truth for me; a young man removed from his perhaps now overly-romanticized childhood on the farm who has discovered that he really wasn’t cut from the military cloth. And perhaps not ironically, ended up as a man of the cloth…
In the end, I guess it says something about how I find peace…
A little dirt, a little prayer.
