In My Father's Garden: A Daughter's Search for a Spiritual Life by Kim Chernin

Author:Kim Chernin [Chernin, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Workman Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Three

ROOT AND BRANCH

Stories require a listener who can suspend disbelief long enough to let the tale emerge. Once under way, the story will take care of itself, gather momentum, forget about the listener, charge off on its mission, whether well received or even vaguely comprehended. Beginnings are the problem.

So there we are, my father and I, cutting back the ivy that grows over the rickety fence from the neighbor’s garden. In this imaginary world, my mother does not have Alzheimer’s, my father is not dead. Our house in Los Angeles has not been sold. I can still go down for a weekend, find my childhood room as it used to be. I can go outside to work with my father in his garden. It is getting late. My mother would be coming home from work, rushing in the way she always used to so that we could have dinner before she rushed out again for a meeting. We would take off our gardening gloves, pack away our trowel and rake, and go out front to meet her, to help her carry in the stacks of pamphlets, brochures, leaflets to be stored in the garage.

It is not conceivable that I would have just said to my father, “You know, Dad, the world is in such a terrible state I don’t think the human race can survive unless we learn to bring our lives into harmony with an unseen, spiritual world.” But that is what I want to say.

If I said to my father that teachers were sent to us at particular moments of historic urgency, when the human community seemed to be at a loss, my father would be constrained to ask, Sent by whom?

This is a reasonable question; my father would not have been satisfied by an answer that evaded it. If we were out working together in the garden (if we were out working together in the garden!) and I were to say to him, I accept the teachers, their presence and their mission, although I do not know anything about the mechanism by which they were sent, my father would have shaken his head, sadly. He would have been greatly disappointed in his daughter.

As poetry, fable, legendary tale, my father would have received these notions patiently. He would have said, “Did I ever tell you about that man in Moscow who believed he could communicate with birds?” But I would not have been able to tell my father that I took these ideas seriously.

SEVERAL YEARS BEFORE my father died, he and I were at the dining room table, after dinner. I was reading the Tao Te Ching in a paperback edition with a smiling, wise old fat man on the cover. I don’t know how the book happened to end up in full view, since I usually kept it hidden, feeling that it was a subversive text, Taoist, mystical, inclined to quietism. My father opened the book, came to a marked passage, read it aloud. “To retire when the task is accomplished is the way of heaven.

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