Rain Garden Today

Rain Gardens need rain. That seems obvious but it became clearer today why that is so. Rainwater, unlike water from the city water system, has no additives. At Growing Power we were taught to let our water sit in watering can for a day before we watered our plants. I guess the additives, which are not good for plants, dissolve in a day. I guess this is what ‘distilled water’ is. Now we all need to use city water to water our plants inside and out when there is no rain. Outside I often fill up the rain barrel with tea bag in it, let it sit for a day and open the spigot and let it run through the rain garden. But rainwater, though probably not pollutant free, is the best for plants. You can tell the difference today after the all-day rain yesterday. We have been watering the perennial flowers in the garden. But today, after the rain, they took on an extra shine and seemed to be bigger. We all need the real thing, be it rain for a rain garden or silence for a person.

I say silence for humans, like rain for a rain garden, because in a busy world there are so many distractions and things to do, that without some interior silence we can lose our grounding and stop growing. Silence allows us to hear God or our higher power in the present. Thomas Merton, in one of his poems, refers to silence this way:

I am the appointed hour,
The ‘now’ that cuts
Time like a blade. (From the collected poems of Thomas Merton)

As plants can go a while without real rain, we can go a while without silence. But eventually plants without water, and we without silence, will dry up. For Christians, followers of the Way of Jesus, we know that Jesus, who lives in the silence in us, said that he would give us living waters so we would thirst no more. Plants grow with the living waters of rain and tea and we grow with the living waters of Silence.

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