Tranquil Reflections on Beauty and Renewal

- July 17, 2020

By Brother Marc

After a day of shopping early last May I returned to the monastery feeling more than the usual muscle aches. I had spent a hectic day searching for items currently unavailable or hard to find because of the pandemic. Then unpacking and sanitizing a week’s supply of groceries and bulk necessities demanded a lot of additional work.

I recall another time I felt unusually tired. Nadya Goldsmith, a member of our Chapel Community, had asked whether we might plant some white lilacs and spirea at the monks’ monastery. We both thought these are attractive and uplifting in springtime, although plain but inoffensive the rest of the year. They are like the old-fashioned yellow forsythia bushes that used to flank the entrance to our smaller chapel and the lavender lilacs we have.

It was around the year 2005. Nadya, an expert gardener, brought a dozen saplings she had harvested from around her home in Cambridge. We chose a spot at the far edge of our monastery cemetery bordering a woodsy area. Her husband, Fr. Dan, had passed away ten years earlier, and this area was across the lawn from his grave.

Our property is located near Vermont, where also a hundred and fifty years ago the hills lost their topsoil to logging and grazing. This often left barely a half inch of soil and an inch of shards of shale before harder rock. Still we opted to plant here anyway. With sore shoulder muscles at that time I could barely use a pick and shovel, but Nadya was full of energy, and together we finally had a wavy row of plants with plenty of room for them to expand and form a hedge.

In 2009 Nadya passed away from a sudden cancer and is buried next to her husband. Now during the civil and church shutdown, my daily walking around the grounds and cemetery brought all this doubly back to mind. Brothers Stavros and Luke have done much to care for the graves, so I often stopped briefly at each cross and read the name and dates on each. After a quick prayer I would swing around to visit our nearby spirea plants, high bushes now with cascades of white blossoms flowing to the ground.

These dramatic blooms remind me also of the white mountain laurel along the highway cuts in Pennsylvania I noticed in my school years—thriving in meager conditions on the edge of wooded areas. More recently I’ve enjoyed discovering large clusters of purple Rhododendron lush in shaded groves, outstanding and rewarding to view. Moments of natural beauty like this reconnect me with a lifetime of such experiences and people I know or have known. They make life all the richer and ever hopeful in whatever the bleak circumstances and social upheaval we are now experiencing.

During this period, I also spent a brief, solitary quiet time at our currently empty Emmaus guest house, which gave me a chance to record the late spring flower scenes there. These are bright and silent witnesses of our Companion Sister Melanie’s creative and tireless work in the meditation gardens. It was all so very tranquil and restful – welcome occasions of soul replenishment and renewal for me.