Mother Earth – Jane Tawel

The Gore and Glory of Gardens

By Jane Tawel

August 27, 2026

How glorious to get gory in the garden.

The scratch of thorns on forearms,

the blisters from the dig with gloveless trowels,

the sweat in pits and crevices of this

amazing bucket of blood and water

that Nature has formed around my soul

to care for my small patch of Mother Earth.

I felt once young and clean again today,

to shape the world with loving shears and mulch.

To mix my blood with Wood and Fruit —

the trellises like crosses,

and vines with open mouths and wounds,

accepting my small part in their salvation.

We small shoots in the ever-growing Universe,

have so much love to give,

have so much love to receive.

To be afraid of change and growth,

is to experience, once more,

our Banishment from The Garden.

I look at the dandelions,

determined to take their place among the flowers of the world,

And I say to them,

“We are not so different, You and I”.

Today, I told the lilies of my field

that though the heating Sun

would kill them now,

their regal raiment was secure;

for beauty never really dies.

And as I brutally cut away

the dead and dying parts

of branch and leaf and husk,

I sang a song of blessing

on the roots and shoots and buds.

I told the bees who looked at me askance,

“A garden must suffer to thrive,

A garden must die to live,

A garden will give and give and give

And you, dear bees and I, must care for Her

with all the skills and love together we can bring”.

A Garden is a glorious, gory thing.

How wonder-full to walk in The Garden,

Returned to The Presence,

at One with small, real, lovely things.

A cosmos contained in a back yard,

shedding blood and sap and dew,

continually dying cells

and resurrecting Life.

We are meant to be

at One,

as Kin,

at Home,

returned to Eden,

in small patches of soil.

The Clearing of Rain

By Jane Tawel

Rain clears me

The sight and sound and smell of water

Coming like manna from the sky

It moves me to poetry.

It stuns me into true meditation.

It opens me to prayer.

Here in the desert-land

of my large, busy city,

we have so little rain

It comes in drips and drabbles.

We have so much of everything here.

And yes, so little.

So many stars on the sidewalks,

so few stars in the sky.

So many buildings soaring

so few shelters for the poor.

So much money spent

so little shared.

So much sun and heat and fire,

and oh, my soul! — so little rain.

I think perhaps we cursed ourselves,

here in this land of grabbers,

when we stopped The People

from their rain dances on The Land.

The Sky-Child has cried all His tears

and has no more.

And The Land has gathered Sky’s tears

into Her deepest womb

where, perhaps we gobblers can not devour them

as we have devoured all Nature’s other gifts.

To strain to hear the tiny drops of rain

reminds me of how hard it is to hear God

with so many plastic gods competing for attention.

The god of AmEx and of Capital One.

The god of the Amazon that rains our money

only on one man as the rainfall in the amazon dries up

to fill my coffee cup.

The great gods masquerading as freedom

concealing the real terror behind their force;

hiding the fact, that they are storm clouds of desire

gathering, ever and ever gathering,

but never coming down among us,

never healing the gardens we plant,

never baptizing us

to give us Life.

Create in me, a new heart, O God,

One that makes a desert of my desires,

compared to my thirst to find

a Kingdom of Quenching others’ thirst,

on Earth,

as it is in the Heavens.

To smell the water

sent from heaven

knowing what it is up against

as it bravely tries to turn to green

our dead desert yards

reminds me even when Hope

is a faint scent of bare possibility,

we must remember —

this land has died before

and it will die again.

And then — perhaps only then —

The rains will return.

May the children, once more,

Dance in puddles left by many rains.

And in this arid, barren fullness,

may we, who have wrinkled

our skins with our endless searches,

our flying to find the sun;

we who have deadened our hides

as we have deadened our hearts;

we who have wasted the water

as we have wasted our precious hours —

may we be cleansed in floods of Love,

Love for our Mother Earth and Father Sky,

Love for our children and our enemies alike.

Baptized with the fire of Our Holy Spirits,

may we dance rain dances once more,

and running out into the deluge,

may we wait with hope for the rain,

with mouths empty and open.

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