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I first learned about the great secret of childhood when I was only six years old. It happened at a terrible time for the world; it was 1941 and nations were at war, and worse, countless soldiers and many, many people including parents and their children were being killed. But one day on the radio, President Roosevelt requested that all the families of the United States who lived in cities find empty lots and begin to plant vegetables for their food. He called them “Victory Gardens” for it was a way we could contribute to the war effort by our becoming self-sufficient as families and allowing all the produce of the large farms to go to feed all our soldiers fighting worldwide.
That very next weekend my mother and our grandmother took my brother Peter and me hand in hand, and we walked about five blocks away to a large vacant corner lot that had nothing on it but barren, dead Bronx dirt. However, it was already a bustling place with lots of neighbors plotting out with string their little gardens, digging up the soil, rolling barrels of rain water here and there. After grandma selected a little section for our family “victory garden,” my mother asked me what kind of vegetable I wanted to plant. I of course did not really understand what she meant by “plant” but knowing what “vegetable” meant I blurted out without thinking: “Carrots!” I am sure I did so because of all the vegetables put on my dinner plate it was this treat of candied carrots that had become my gustatory favorite. My mother used to cook thin baby carrots in a big pan with lots of butter and sugar, and they were superabundantly delicious.
She told me to open up my little hand and from a little white envelope with carrots pictured on it she poured some seeds into my open palm. I looked down at the pile of them in my hand, and they looked to me like dried up mouse droppings like I’d find under our radiator at home.
“Ugh,” I complained. “What’s that stuff?”
“Those are carrot seeds,” my mother said.
“How can carrots come from that dead stuff?” I complained.
Grandma then entered into the explanation telling me that first I had to bury them in the dirt, and she began scratching a line in the hard ground with a stick.
“Well,” I said to grandma, “that makes sense to bury dead things – Peter and I buried a dead sparrow once -- but how could carrots come out of those blackish gray shriveled–up dead things – I mean, carrots are orange with green tops?”
Grandma smiled and said, “God will make it happen. Just plant them, and you will see.”
So I did, and then we got some water in a bucket from the barrel, and I made mud over my grave. Every day I came back to visit my graveyard and watched nothing happening until I about lost all hope. I complained to my mother and all she said was that she was sure something was happening but that it was hidden underground still. I told her that I was going to go and dig it up to see what I could see, but she said, “No, no, no! You can’t do that ‘cause you will ruin the happening. Paul, you just have to trust God and nature. You’ll see.”
Well, I did not want to ruin the “happening” so I waited and waited some more. And then one bright afternoon when I looked at my bit of the “victory garden” I saw green feathery sprouts coming out of the dead dirt. It was happening as they said it would! I was on my hands and knees feeling the soft, light green feathers of my carrot sprouts, and my heart/mind/soul said: “Wow!”
I tried to understand what had taken place, but I just could not figure it out. I knew I had buried dried up dead things into the dried up dead Bronx dirt. How did those dead things come to life and how did they change dead brown dirt into such lovely live green feathery sprouts? I believe I actually asked that question to the seedling carrots in my little victory garden; “How did you do that?” It seemed absolutely impossible, but I could not deny that I was seeing it happen.
That “wow” changed my life, for I now knew the power and magic of nature – and how especially wondrous was the beginning time of living things. The seed knew how to become what it had always been meant to become. All it needed was to be taken out of an envelope and be placed in a seed bed – and some watering now and then if it did not rain. I remembered this awakening of my utter respect for nature and for the beginning life of things all through my own developing from child to man. I was in on the great secret: there exists this great force of life to develop from the inside out – if only you give it a chance.
I knew that the carrot seeds did not need me to rub that dirt into them – or to somehow pull roots down and sprouts up – they already knew how to do all that and more. Seedlings are miracle workers and only needed me to give them a chance to show their stuff! Their deepest instinct was to develop to their fullest potentials on their own and welcomed a gardener who knew enough to prepare the soil, supply some water when the skies forgot to rain, and to be a good friend.
My brother Pete and I were never so respected when we were placed into the garden of our schooling. Our teachers had no knowledge that we also were like carrots and plants the offspring of Mother Nature, and that we had within our very cores similar strong instincts to become all we could become as human persons. Our teachers thought of us as kids needing to be taught and disciplined, and so that is what they did to us. They pushed in those things they were hired to teach us, and they pulled out the kinds of behavior they were taught to expect from us. They had no understanding that we could develop from the inside out as every other natural creature can.
Our teachers were themselves taught and trained to believe that children needed to be taught and trained. They simply never considered that language was a natural gift of being a human person – as was counting and figuring with numbers. They saw these human traits only as disconnected subjects to be drilled into us – things to be corrected on our daily classroom exercises or homework papers and then to be graded on tests.
As far as they were concerned there was nothing “natural” about subjects on a published curriculum – and so they employed only “un-natural” means to get us to master such tricks – the way one would teach a dog to roll over and play dead. Their teaching strategies, accordingly, were of the reward and punish variety – the proverbial “carrot and stick” techniques used by circus trainers.
Gardeners know that they must allow the plants to grow and develop on their own. A good gardener is patient and does not meddle with what is happening when her various plants are “doing what comes naturally.” The plants – be they carrots or tomatoes are permitted to become. Peter and I and the rest of the kids in school were not permitted to become. We were permitted nothing except recess – and being let loose from being so confined for so long that recess was a wild and wooly time, I tell you.
For some reason our teachers did not trust us to be ourselves, and worked very hard every day to shape us into ideal “first graders” – yes, they dealt with us if we were all the same – our teachers rarely considered us as individuals – we were always some class of “graders” as if we were clones – they even would address as such: “My first graders open up your books to page…” I recall one such teacher who used to always refer to her self in the third person: “Mrs. Gallagher wants her fourth graders to take out their math homework now.” Almost every nuance of respecting the little ones of Mother Nature had disappeared by the time Pete and I got into school. Our particular graded school on Castle Hill Avenue was a most “unnatural” place.
No, there was nothing in all the twelve years of schooling that came close to reminding me of the “secret” I discovered when I first witnessed my carrots growing all by themselves from the dead seeds I had planted that Saturday morning in the Bronx of my childhood. My first reminder came much later when I was studying philosophy in college and read Thoreau’s “Walden” where he states so emphatically: “I did not wish to live what was not life.” Thoreau was the first educator to reveal to me that I was in my actuality the very leading edge of Nature, and so if I were to have hope of being all I was meant to be, I must discover and release my natural gifts as a person – all that innate creativity that had for so long been inhibited by my “schooling.” Finding my personal purpose in life – my personal destiny – depended on my being the natural me I was born to be – discovering and releasing the instinctive powers of the heart/mind/soul of me, Paul. To accomplish this revelation, Thoreau suggested, required the kind of peace and freedom that one finds when alone in the wilds of nature. There was a need to return to nature if one was to attain that degree of contemplation to perceive what is truly natural in one’s self – and then begin to live what was your life.
Fortunately, Fordham University was nestled right up against the expansive Bronx Botanical Gardens which was about as much Nature as one could hope to find in that borough of New York City. I began taking long walks alone on the winding paths that went through its gardens and into its deep woods. One Saturday morning I dared to go off the path and into the wilder domain of its ancient trees. A ways into the thick of it I came to a small clearing, and in the middle of that little meadow I stood still, raised my arms up toward the sky and said to myself: “I am a tree, too! I am tree, and I am more than a tree – I am a person made in “the image and likeness of God!” I was exhilarated by this moment of revelation and felt the same wonder I felt so long ago when as a child I discovered the secret power of my carrot seeds. I experienced another “Wow!” moment that would inform the rest of my life.
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