Vachon Imagined

When I was a child, my grandmother and her mother would walk through the garden together, marveling at what seemed to have appeared overnight.

Of course, it hadn’t.

Every radiant squash, every tomato bending its vine, every bean climbing toward the sun had been preceded by weeks of quiet diligence—watering, weeding, waiting, sacrificing today’s comfort for tomorrow’s harvest.

Still, when they stepped into the garden each morning, there was always a sense of wonder, as though the earth itself had surprised them.

The vegetables almost glittered in the sun.

What I remember most, though, wasn’t the garden.

It was them.

Two generations of women walking slowly through the rows, their conversation moving as naturally as the breeze through the leaves. They spoke of family, neighbors, recipes, seasons, and ordinary things that somehow became sacred simply because they were spoken with love.

Without realizing it, they were teaching me something far greater than gardening.

They were teaching me to trust the earth.

Sometimes something grew that didn’t belong.

A weed.

A diseased plant.

Something that would never bear fruit.

There wasn’t much discussion about it.

They simply pulled it up by the roots and kept tending what remained.

There was no resentment toward the weed.

No judgment.

Just the quiet understanding that not everything deserves a place in the garden.

And every night, when the work was finished, my grandmother would gather my brother and me beside her and pray.

I especially remember pressing myself against her, clinging to her as though she were something immovable—a rod, an anchor, the safest place I knew.

At the time, I thought her prayers were simply words spoken before sleep.

Only now do I understand they were seeds.

Night after night, she planted something inside us that neither of us could yet see.

Faith.

Peace.

Attention.

Love.

Looking back nearly forty-five years later, I can still hear her voice.

I can still feel the warmth of the soil in my hands and remember the joy of holding fruit I had done nothing to grow.

I was only a witness.

A child enjoying the harvest of labor that belonged to generations before me.

Only now do I understand that they were cultivating more than vegetables.

They were cultivating me.

The prayers.

The hands in the soil.

The conversations drifting through the rows.

The quiet removing of what no longer belonged.

It was all the same work.

Every morning they tilled the earth.

Every evening my grandmother tended our hearts.

She is gone now.

The little girl who clung to her has grown into a woman, and the hands that once held mine have long since returned to the earth they loved.

And yet…

She has never really left.

She still lives in my heart.

She lives in my words.

In the attention I give.

In the work of my own hands.

In the questions I ask.

Her life continues each time I choose to cultivate instead of consume, to tend instead of hurry, to notice instead of overlook.

The garden became the first language I ever learned about consciousness.

This, I think, is what it means to live within the field of awareness—the abundance of God.

We step into the same garden every day.

We plant seeds with the thoughts we cultivate, the attention we give, and even the resistance we cling to. Whatever we return to again and again eventually takes root.

There are countless stories, countless lives, countless experiences.

Yet they all arise within the same field.

One garden.

One stream of life expressing itself in infinite forms.

The plants.

My great-grandmother.

My grandmother.

My brother.

Me.

Different expressions of the same living current.

Long before I understood their words, they had already become part of me.

Long before I harvested the vegetables, I had inherited the hands that knew how to tend them.

Perhaps that is what inheritance truly is.

Not what we receive.

But what quietly grows inside us because someone else was willing to cultivate the ground before we arrived.

Today, I still walk through that garden.

Not with my feet.

With my awareness.

And every thought that asks for my attention invites another question.

Is this part of awareness worthy of my time?

Is it worthy of my attention?

Is it worthy of bearing fruit?