Last evening as I prepared a meal of eggplant, yellow squash, green beans, and wax beans seasoned with dill, I remarked to myself “it’s like magic.” Every item in the meal, including the seasoning, was grown in our backyard. It was a veritable feast for a vegetarian like me.

As I rinsed the dirt off the squash, I smiled knowing that I did not need to worry about pesticides or non-organic substances creeping into my meal. The gardener in our family, never uses those things.

At dinner, I tasted each vegetable planted by my wife. The subtle taste of yellow squash, the stronger slightly sweeter taste of eggplant, the satisfying crunch of the green beans, and the slightly squishier less pronounced flavor of the wax beans satisfied my vegetarian soul.

I tasted the magic that is Creation. With a few seeds, water, with loving weeding and tilling, and a little luck multiple meals are growing under the eastern Oregon sun in my backyard.  They make their way into the house where I prepare most of our meals. (My freezer is also slowly filling up with food for those cold winter days.)

As the non-gardener, it is probably easier for the meal to seem magical. But of course it’s not really magic. The harvest is the divine dance between Creation and the human being who nurtured the earth and seeds to fruition. Perhaps that is why the gardener in my family talks about gardening as a spiritual practice. Each year gardeners co-create a harvest with God.

What else could we create if we listened to the spirit of love moving across the earth?