God’s Garden Heals Wounds That Scar the Soul ......By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

God’s Garden Heals Wounds That Scar the Soul

By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan

Below my house is a small pond where I used to put goldfish for my kids to appreciate. I limped towards it yesterday, the pond is still there, less the small colorful fishes. The pond reflects the day of mist in gray tones. Much like my mood.

When the sky is blue, the pond is blue, the sky staring back down at it. Patterns like icewebs spread across the surface as a water strider hurries. So much so like most of us when we take on the moods of others. All around, I’m surrounded by plum, lemon, wax apples, rambutan, lanzones, guava, Davao pomelo, African tulips, soap nut trees, Arabica coffee, petroleum trees, all draped with three kinds of passion fruits racing at every inch of branch they could hang on.

A few yards away, fallen, lemon, wild strawberries, guavas , coffee berries carpet the ground.., branches bending with heavy laden fruits–all left untouched. It is rare that anyone, except I, comes here.

The pine forest a hundred yards away is touched by the actions of the sky and wind. At night and all through the day, changes take place. Sometimes the sky glitters with wings – sometimes it is softened by the falling pine needles. Man’s soul has a light like that of a lantern that is untroubled in the turmoil of wind and storm.

It is here where I seek shelter when my spirit is broken. Where I many times speak to God. Where he speaks back to me. Here I find comfort in his words “The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail”.(Isaiah 58,  v.11).

Though it is just October, cold nights and chilly dawn have been creeping. The most recent full moon last week lit the land like a night sky — so bright the whole forest silhouette was visible. The spiders chose to stay in the shadows and even the owls seldom call when it gets cold. Only a late Luzon fruit bat braves the breeze hurrying home.

My ancient Igorot headhunting ancestors used the moon to show how everything is in a circle. The shape of our eyes are curved toward round, the world is round and so the moon and stars and many other things. But the best is the circle which is infinity — life everlasting, no beginning and no end.

From my orchard many trails lead to different places–to the pine forest, the highway, a chasm and to neighbors’ homes. Where one follows, it may never be the right trail. Often, my feet wander far for answers to the same questions my grandfathers asked, chanted about and prayed over in the quiet of their own thoughts. What is this life problem that plagues me now? Why am I my worst enemy that tries to rule my thinking and actions?

Here, under the canopy and shadows of my trees I realize so many people especially the have-nots and the powerless, are worthy of thoughts and much-needed prayers. That personal problems and ills are miniscule; that the misfortunes we feel, are far from the sufferings of others. I have been talking to my son Michael Jr. on why our society is scarred of unending negative energies, why self renewal is at its best rejected in the face of economically and politically-driven wrong choices. One of the strangest thing about life is when we talk of change, people say they embrace it but we see a few doing that especially if the change threatens their comfort zones.

Our space and those for the unborn are invaded by what we fear borne out of our own miscomprehension. This is not an illusion and the price to pay is equally beyond comprehension. That there are things that happen that cannot be explained is acceptable but there are things that should have happened, but never did, is wanting of explanation.

The voice in my garden tells me to understand these with joy. Joy because we are motivated and propelled to work more believing the whole world is much better without our own frustrations. Looking at my garden makes me believe so, the plants assuring my thoughts.

Life is too beautiful to go on and a bitter pill that insists I swallow it can never be an option. An adage goes that “the man who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the grief which he proposes to remove.”

I need to unburden myself by doing something that will put a smile on someone else’s face. As my plants did to me. There are not many things in my life that I can truthfully say mean everything to me. The small things are important and very dear, but the really significant things I count on one hand – my faith, love ones, friends, my good desires, my country and life.

I guess one of the most magnified situations in this day is taking life too seriously …. in the stress of too much mental social confusion, some people seem unable to laugh off some. Especially so if it involves issues that drumbeat our society daily without pause. We let mental presumptions rule ourselves into making solutions source of further problems, anxiety, and depression until it dramatically chokes us.

I look at the anthuriums growing wild with ferns, Margarets blooming bright yellow under the rising October sun, the wild pink roses starting to unfurl and the glistening moss covering the pond’s stone rim from which a lizard peered, I know there is still a bright day ahead. And the day after tomorrow, and the other morrows.

I follow an ant column seeking out food from a niche in the ground ignoring a centipede unsavory and too ill-smelling for breakfast and like them I am hopeful there is something promising at the next bend.

And even as the confusion is there, it becomes a bit bearable knowing the worthwhile side of life is too important to let myself become involved with something that mean little to me now.

God told me that.