Hello and welcome to Loving the Imperfect. Today I wanted to introduce you to one of my favorite people, Vita Sackville West. These are little anecdotes of what I thought of while I was reading the psalm. And, and that's important. Sometimes the psalms will bring back memories. And little interesting things that you did in the past that you don't really think of anymore.
I like to pay attention to these moments because sometimes mundane memories are meant to be reflected on and thought about. I do think that there's a reason we think of things, that there's reason certain memories are brought back to us, so when I was reading Psalm 52, I was reminded of my friend, I would call her my friend, even though she's not alive anymore and we never met in real life. But she was the voice in my head for the years when I was gardening a lot. I'll talk more about that in a minute. Let's read Psalm 52. The first part starts a little differently. The tone is different than what I want to talk about today, but just bear with me.
Psalm 52:
“Why do you boast of evil? You mighty hero.
Why do you boast all day long? You who are a disgrace in the eyes of God. You who practice deceit. Your tongue plots destruction. It is like a sharpened razor. You love evil rather than good. Falsehood rather than speaking truth. You love every harmful word, you deceitful tongue. Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin.
He will snatch you up and pluck you from your tent. He will uproot you from the land of the living. The righteous will see and fear. They will laugh at you, saying, Here now is the man who does not make God his stronghold, but trusted in his great wealth, and grew strong by destroying others. But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God.
I trust in God's unfailing love forever and ever.
For what you have done, I will always praise you in the presence of your faithful people. And I will hope in your name, for your name is good.”
In verse eight, David sums up this psalm by saying, I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God. I trust in God's unfailing love forever and ever. I love this image of David comparing himself to an olive tree. I used to do a lot of gardening. I even had a blog based on the writings of Vita Sackville West, she was the owner of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England.
And she was the creator of the beautiful gardens there, whose love and devotion was all about the garden. It was all about the flowers and all about the plants and the trees and creating beauty out of nothing. When she moved into Sissinghurst castle and worked with a very wild land. When she first moved there the flowers and the trees and the plants, that is creation. To me, that is God. When you pay attention to the flowers. When you're gardening, you're gazing at flowers. You're gazing at, meditating on the plants in a different way than someone else would who has really no interest. You're in love with everything that grows in your garden. To me, this is how God sees us. God sees us like a gardener would his or her flowers. Vita Sackville West, she took that land at Sissinghurst Castle, it was pretty dilapidated when she bought it, the land was wild.
She took that and by gazing at the land and imagining and meditating on it. She was able to create beauty. She was able to take every square inch of that garden and imagine something different for it. I imagine that that's what God does with us, that we start out a certain way and God sort of If, if we gaze at God and God gazes back at us, which I believe God always is, God can create in us something beautiful. But it takes that gazing, that's meditation, that’s loving, that's being intentional about how we're moving in the world and with other people.
That's how the garden is too. You have to be intentional with your flowers. You have to pay attention to some flowers that are taking over areas that they shouldn't be. I had two honeysuckle plants in my garden. Honeysuckle is a vine. It was so great in my garden. I loved it so much that I bought another one. But I bought the wrong one. I bought a wild version by accident. And you can tell the wild version is not a polite plant. The vine takes over everything. It grows anywhere it wants. It's taking over now my lavender bushes and it's trying to take over my other honeysuckle that just stays right where I planted it, and it flourishes there.
It's destroying the other plants around it. I'm going to have to do something or keep an eye on it and cut it back all the time. And if I don't keep an eye on it, it's going to take over. What I loved about gardening was that it taught me more about the human condition. It taught me more about God. It taught me more about creation.
It had many stories to tell me. And I believe that Vita Sackville-West learned the same things in the garden. Gardeners are very patient, just like I said, writers are very patient, gardeners are very patient too, they plant something in the wrong area, they have to wait another whole year before you can transplant that, and three years after that, before the plant actually starts to take root and flourish and get into its good growing state. She and her husband bought Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England, and when they bought it, the gardens were just not even really visible, she completely transformed that place. To this day, you can go visit her gardens.
I have yet to make that trip, just being on the same ground that she walked would be so cool. She was a fellow writer. I'm a writer. She was a writer. She wrote an awesome biography of St. Joan of Arc, which I really enjoyed. She was excellent at research and her garden books that I have, I have I think at least four garden books of hers and they were taken from when she would do articles for the observer in the 1950s. People would write in questions about their garden, about the flowers, about how to take care of everything and she would write back.
So these books are compilations of her answers back to these people. The way that she talks about flowers is just beautiful. She would get catalogs in the winter, and that's what got her through the winter she would just flip through them at night, and it would help cure her of her own winter funk.
She would keep her seeds from her flowers or if she bought seeds, she would keep them in old typewriter tape cartridges, the little tins that the tape would come in, and she would have them all labeled meticulously, She also had one part of her garden she called the white garden and she planted nothing but white flowers because at night they would glow in the dark and so she would take these night walks through her white garden and all the flowers would be glowing.
Just beautiful stuff like that. She was an artist and I love her. Vita Sackville West was actually best friends, really good friends, with Virginia Woolf. They both came into age in that really interesting time after world war one, when women’s fashion started to change, they stopped wearing corsets and they exchanged letters about the velvet coats they were buying. They were best friends, and it's said that they were, at one point, lovers. They went back and forth with love letters. Vita Sackville West wrote several garden books and for a few years there, she was my muse, my muse in the garden, my inspiration; I read everything of hers. Because the way she talked about plants and flowers was so magical to me. It was like a balm to my soul because it was during the time when I was having a lot of panic and anxiety attacks.
And so I went into the garden to find some solace. And I found her there. I found her. I don't even know how I was introduced to her. I can't remember, but it was meant to be surely because she saved me, you know, a part of that, that gardening. That was part of why I was cured was because I stayed in the garden. I'm not really involved with my garden anymore. Like I used to be, I still garden, but I'm just not as good at it anymore. She's still the voice in my head. Sometimes I’ll remember something she said, and I pine for her like I would an old childhood friend and it makes me want to read her work again, which I'm so lucky to have all of her books because I guess they're pretty rare. I'm sure you can find them though on eBay or something, but I would recommend reading some of her work.
I remember my son one time, I thought this was so brilliant. He came home from kindergarten. He's 16 now, but he came home from kindergarten, and he had a really bad day. He said that his friends were being mean to him and so he just came home.
He put his backpack down. He took his tennis shoes off and put his boots on and he said, “I'm gonna go dig”. And he went out into our garden, where we had like a digging pile for him, a place, a place where he could dig dirt. I don't know and find whatever he wanted. He went out there and he dug in the dirt and it, it blew off steam for him.
That's what the garden can do. That's what physical labor, that's what physical work can do. It can help you blow off steam and it can help you work through any sort of mental anguish that you might be dealing with. And so I thought that was so amazing that at six years old, he knew how to do this.
It just naturally came to him so when I went into the garden to find this solace at that time, because at that time, I wasn't really studying scripture or getting into spirituality at all. It was just me and the plants. And it was a beautiful time. It was not complicated. It was just, I was who I always had been, but I was trying to heal myself.
That was the tipping point for me, I think, into transformation. And I didn't know it was coming, but the garden introduced me to that mystical spiritual side of myself. So, I think, I imagine even then my spirit was reaching out for this deeper meaning.
I believe the growth of my spirit began in the garden. I've spoken before about finding yourself a teacher. And at this time, in the garden, Vita Sackville West was my teacher. If you go on my website, If you're interested, it's my name, www.Brianne Turczynski.com. If you scroll down far enough, you will be able to read the seventy posts I made in her honor.
When I was managing that blog I would take these pictures of all the flowers and I was able to take these amazing pictures of flowers. I can't do that anymore. And it's because I was actually seeing the flowers. I was really in love with them, truly. And I was really seeing their life force.
I can't seem to take a good picture of a flower these days because as the blog morphed into a book blog, I started talking about books that I was reading, because I have this collection of books and a lot of them are old, I started looking at books. So, first gazing at flowers, seeing the life force of the flowers. Then I moved over to books, and I was seeing the life force of the books. Books aren't alive, of course, but the authors, people wrote these words, I'm so thankful that we have books, that we have these words.
I found so many things about human beings that. I didn't know, like, this is totally off subject, but I’ve always wondered, I get these songs in my head and they just keep me up all night and I hate it. I must listen to John Coltrane before I go home at night from work because whatever song with words will just be in my head all night.
So, I always wondered, did people a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago get songs stuck in their head to the point where it would almost drive them insane? So then I'm reading, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. And he mentions in there, and you know, this is late 1800s. He mentions that he had a song stuck in his head all night or all day or something.
So that just made me so happy. This is what I mean when I say the human condition hasn't changed. In this case, with the olive tree, the image of the olive tree with David, I looked it up, the care of an olive tree because we can't grow them where I live, they prefer a warmer, drier climate. So I looked it up and I found that the olive tree is an evergreen, which means it doesn't lose its leaves in the winter. And so this reminded me of the story of St. Boniface, who, was a medieval saint in the 700s, he had a ministry With the pagan nations in what is Germany now.
And what he did, he was getting pretty frustrated with the pagan people there. They had always worshipped an oak tree, a massive oak tree. And they had gatherings under it. And it is suspected that there was human sacrifice under the oak tree. St. Boniface, he had tried to convert them and, They were baptized, they were converted, but then he had to leave and go visit, I think, the Pope or the Bishop or something. And when he came back to his people that he was trying to work with, they had gone right back to their old ways.
So, kind of like Moses and the golden calf story in the Old Testament. So, he got very frustrated, and he started to chop down their oak tree. Hundreds of people showed up to watch him chop this oak tree down their sacred oak tree.
And you'd think that they would rise and try to kill him for doing this, but instead, they just sat back and watched him because they were fascinated, and they thought for sure that their god Thor would come and kill Saint Boniface for doing this terrible thing.
But instead, the oak tree fell, and nothing happened. So, these people thought.
Oh geez, our God did not say anything. And so, they started to have this sliver of doubt. And legend says, that in the place of that oak tree out of the stump grew an evergreen fir tree. Symbolizing the everlasting life of Christ because it's an evergreen, it never dies in the winter, it doesn't lose its leaves, it's always green with life.
Symbolizing also new life, new faith, that's what came to mind when I read that the olive tree is an evergreen. There's a lot of symbolism in that, being an evergreen. St. Boniface actually ended up being martyred one of the tribes there finally caught up with them and killed them.
I don't condone his act of chopping down an oak tree
But I remember the story of St. Boniface, especially in the winter months here in Michigan, when everything is sleeping and brown, and there is no green in sight. And many people at this time in the winter slip into seasonal depression because there is no sun and there is no green. And so, I look to the pines, and I remember life and it sometimes brings me out of, or at least gives me a window out of my winter funk.
If only for a moment. This image of David being like an olive tree is really symbolic. It is a symbol of life everlasting, of peace. And this goes back to ancient Greece, as it is supposed to drive away evil spirits.
It was a symbol for Irene, Greek goddess of peace. An olive branch is also present in the story of Noah. If you remember the story of Noah and the ark, The dove brings back an olive branch as a sign that the water during the flood had receded and that land was in sight.
And in the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, said that the olive tree was a blessed tree, as far as David picturing himself as an olive tree, he is immersed in God by knowing God and gazing at God through meditation. What I mean by that is you can meditate and concentrate on your breathing, but what I mean is when you're really interested in something you have to meditate on it you have to think about it. You have to immerse yourself in the thoughts of that object or whatever it is So in Vita sec the West's case she was meditating on the garden in David's case he was meditating on God. With people who are artists or writers, they're meditating on whatever story it is that they're trying to write or whatever poem they're trying to compose. Musicians meditate on the songs that they're writing.
So, I would recommend that you get out in the garden and you stick your hands in the dirt and you get in there with all the worms and all the grubs and all of the spiders and everything. It's good for you. Dirt is good for you. And it's cleansing. And so is the garden to our souls. So, I would recommend that you do that.
And so, now I will leave you with an entry from Vita Sackville West about olive trees. She didn't have olive trees in her garden, so sometimes she would pull from other people's advice that they had given to her. This is what she had to say about olive trees specifically. She says:
March 7th, 1954
“A man told me that in his Buckinghamshire Garden, he grows fan trained olives against a brick wall. They do not fruit. But I can well believe his claim that their gray green leaves most pleasing, especially in winter, when most wall shrubs are bare of leaf. The olive is usually described as suitable only for milder counties. But Buckinghamshire cannot be included under that heading. And moreover, there is, or was for many years an olive, thus trained at Kew as an experiment for anyone with memories of the Mediterranean landscapes. It would be worth trying.”
So that concludes our episode. I hope you all have a nice week. Next week's psalm is 59. 59 concludes our Psalms of David. After that we're moving on to other Psalms from other writers because we skip every seventh Psalm. We won't hit another one from David after this. Thank you for joining me today. Bye. Bye
