Becoming a Family of Plenty

Craig Goodwin, who’s wonderful book I highly recommend, has written up some steps for Becoming a Family of Plenty on Beliefnet.  A clip below.  Above, a photo of the labyrinthine garden that he and his family planted.

The Labyrinth shape echoes the historic practice in the church of walking a labyrinth as a lived metaphor of our winding journey to God at the center. The convergence of our backyard, a vegetable garden, and a labyrinth has been a spark to my imagination about the relationship between tending the garden and attending to my relationship with God.

Wendell Berry speaks to this in The Art of the Commonplace when he says, “The ‘drudgery’ of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all…. It is—in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need—a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body with all bodies.” Berry’s comments reinforce what I have discovered—that gardening is a practice that helps connect us to the web of Creation and provokes us to consider our connections to the Creator.