What brings you closer to The Good Thing
And the magic of noticing
My younger sisters came to visit last weekend; we chatted and shopped and cooked and drank tea. When we browsed around to find something to watch Saturday evening, we landed on a recent remake of The Secret Garden.
It was grossly overdone, with the director seeming to care less about the story and more about the modern magic of CGI. Now I’m thankful for the bad rendition because, after watching it, I plucked my childhood copy of TSG off the shelf and spent the week rereading it in order to remember all the things the movie did wrong.
Having now re-familiarized myself with the original story, what I dislike most about the movie is that it made ‘Magic’ a kind of Harry-Potter-esque thing. Plants would change color or die or grow in response to the children’s moods, the garden was bigger on the inside than the outside, etc. It was fantastical. In the book, the surly and sour child protagonists do experience ‘Magic’ and call it such. But it isn’t a fairy-tale sort of thing. All the magic there is is the magic of noticing.
Toward the end of the book, one of the children wants to sing or shout to praise this Magic for making him well again. He’d spent the spring watching flowers bud and tottering around a garden, letting good things grow while he unknowingly grew with them. Someone suggests they sing the Doxology. When they do, they realize praising God suffices in praising the Magic. “Perhaps they are both the same thing,” one child says. “How can we know the exact names for everything?”
When he goes on to ask a mother about Magic, she says:
I never knowed it by that name, but what does th’ name matter? I warrant they call it a different name i’ France an’ a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing… Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million—worlds like us. Never thee stop believin’ in th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it—an’ call it what tha’ likes.
I heard one message come to me from a few different sources this week—podcasts and books and friends—all saying the same thing. (When that happens, I try to listen.) Each of them said: Do something every day that brings you closer to God.
The big ‘G’ word is triggering for most folks. I shirked from it for a long while. If you fall in that category, no worries. Follow The Secret Garden's advice “an’ call it what tha’ likes.” Substitute it with ‘The Universe’ or ‘Magic’ or ‘The Good Thing,’ as you please.
But that message has sent me spinning a little. For the last few weeks, I’ve been chronically dissatisfied. A lot of it stems from uncertainty about career moves and frustration with my work-life balance.
Do something daily that brings you closer to God? I have never felt so disconnected from God as the last few months. How can I connect with God when I’m in this mess? My connection with God is obviously being impeded by this job, maybe I just need to change it and then I’ll be able to connect with God.
That logic disempowers both me and the universe.
If my connection to all the magic in the world is so fickle that a day job could completely obstruct it, it’s a wonder I’ve ever experienced anything meaningful at all. And if the universe’s connection is so conditional that it could be overridden this easily, that would mean that the universe is far less powerful than I know it to be.
What makes The Secret Garden such a beautiful read is its understanding of magic. All the magic there is is the magic of noticing.
When I walk through the streets, open and ready to see the loveliness that surrounds me, I notice a mother hurriedly taking her trash bin to the street corner. I find her just full of light and I love her for her busyness in the slow morning.
Other times, all the light has been sucked out of the room. Boredom, frustration, impatience, and loneliness reign. I could see a joyous young couple with their baby, or the petals of a lily, and I’d morosely dwell on how I’ll never find happiness like theirs and gruffly walk past the lilies without seeing them.
Things will never be perfect. Jobs, relationships, children, money. Something will always be off-kilter. I can’t wait for this job to change, or for everything to be perfect to connect with God. So how can I come closer to God now?
What’s brought me into the presence and the magic of noticing more than anything else the last few weeks are flowers. I’ve been arranging bouquets almost every day, dreaming of a cut flower garden, admiring lavender and salvia and roses in bloom. So, as an experiment, for this week I will do three things, every day.
Make one bouquet a day. Conveniently, my workplace has plenty of flowers that get nowhere near enough admiration.
Gardening. I have a sweet little garden that has had better and worse times, but this week I added some sweet potato slips and Cherokee tomatoes, and a couple of new peppers. I want to get my hands in the dirt.
Meditating. I do my best to uphold my practice, but I’ve not sustained a daily meditation habit for weeks. Starting small, 15 minutes or so before work. It’ll help me connect with myself and with the plants a bit more easily.
The Secret Garden is the story of an unhappy and disconnected girl learning to love by learning to garden. I think it’s the most beautiful account of springtime I’ve ever read.
We’re just past the peak of summer, and today I saw the first scarlet leaves of the year. Everything is growing as quickly as it can, trying to flower and fruit and seed before the season shifts. I will try my hardest to notice, despite myself. Because all the magic there is is the magic of noticing.
If you have your own way of feeling connected, of noticing, would you share it? Comment your insight, I’d love to hear it. As always, thank you for reading Internal Alchemy.
