Pentimento

"Pentimento (n). An underlying image in a painting, as an earlier painting, part of a painting, or original draft that is revealed usually when the top layer of paint becomes transparent with age. From the Italian pentimento, correction; from pentire, to repent." It is my new favorite word. It rolls around in my mouth and trips off the end of my tongue. Not as many syllables as my decades-old favorite, onomatopoeia; but easier to spell.

The garden is full of pentimenti. The garden is a pentimento; the old in juxtaposition with the new. When I began renovating gardens at this house, I uncovered dozens of long-buried stepping stones and made new pathways with them. I recreated a garden made of bricks surrounding a decaying stump. I plant annuals in the rich loam of stump and make a work of art with beautiful broken things. Each spring the leaves of a bulb plant grow through the arms of my broken garden goddess. Yesterday I discover this year's contribution to annual artwork. I pause at my new garden gate to look at my collection of artifacts dug up from ground as I have created my gardens over the past four years. They are reminders of the family who lived here before me. Mel, visiting my early spring garden, and I discover shoots of the  emerging giant hosta, pushing up through the layers of decay of last year's plant. (It was Mel who found them last year, too!) The hydrangea canes support dried blossoms from last season and new bright green leaves. The strong leaves of the daffodil push up through the winter-hard ground and  pierce dead leaves at the surface, carrying them up with them as they grow.

I consider the human species as I walk through the garden pentimento in the early dawn this week: all of the what and who we have been are still with us. We cover them up, layer upon layer like the strata in a New Mexico cliff. Sometimes the original is just a draft, as we practice who we are in our forming beings. As we discover the new, and mature in the old, we lay down the layers. Sometimes we repent of who we have been and revise and re-form. Once in a while we overlay something that is sweet and true as we allow bad experiences or relationships to drag us away from our selves. Sometimes we put on layers of protection in an attempt to avoid past pain; and sometimes we allow the pain to become part of us and of our honest relationships with one another. But always, what might have been is covered over by what was or is, as our journey becomes the path, and we lose sight of what we thought would be. Mostly that is inevitable; you know: life is what happens while we are making other plans. We forget our dreams and the person we have been. But sometimes, if we let ourselves empty and live into stillness, we can rediscover our selves and our dreams. I am finding, as I age, I become more transparent--like my mother's translucent skin that allows the life-giving veins to shine through. I recall the alphabetical volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia that occupied the bottom shelf of the basement bookcase of my childhood home. The plastic pages in the "B for body" volume where I turned back the skin page to reveal the skeleton, and it in turn to reveal the muscles, then the internal organs and veins. And then back to the first page to look at all the layers showing through the one on top. I wonder if the internet version of the encyclopedia is quite as fascinating?


I was once in relationship with someone who considered her layers to be like those of an onion. In order to know her, other people, she believed, had to be willing to peel away the layers to get to her true self. I think, now, that it is our true self that pushes from our core outward through the layers; not the other way around. We see it only when we stop moving and create space. And it is up to me to make myself known to others, not others to find me. I don't remove the layers, as I seek rediscovery, because they are part of me. I just seek to make them transparent as I open myself to be known. Pentimento.

So often, along with the pride I feel in having made a life of my own and accomplished great joy in the doing, I can’t quite let go of what is dead. Days later, the daffodil has still not shed the dead leaf, and the green shoot is bowing over; letting the dead leaf form its shape. We carry the old with us. And that is good. Trying to change the past, or bring back the dead, is not. Carrying it in a place that keeps us from healthy movement toward the new, is not. From my window at the cafe this morning I can see a bare tree and a tree full of new leaves and an oak tree covered with dead leaves. We are all so different. Some of us shed the old and wait, empty, for what may come. Others, like the oak tree, cling to the old until something new comes along and pushes away the dead. I often chastise myself for not being able to let go of what is over. But I think I am an oak tree. Maybe that is okay. It all happens in its time.

Yesterday I start my patio project. I have spent weeks poking the ground where I want to build it--under the spreading, cooling branches of the dogwood tree. But that location presents an obstacle: roots; roots close to the surface. I won't be able to dig to the six inch depth recommended to "do it right." And there is the ground cover to be cleared. The dwarf mondo grass I transplanted into holes I filled late last summer is doing really well. It has a flourishing root system that will need to be removed. And then there is the tamping down of the ground; the hauling of gravel and sand; finding and transporting brick; laying bricks. And, of course, I want a circle--the hardest design to get right. But I decide to just do it; to say YES to my patio dream. Nothing good will ever happen if we don't just begin it. As serendipity would have it, yesterday--on the morning I am to begin--I read in Patti Digh's book, Creative is a Verb (I wonder how the world would be different if every person were to read this book) that life is yearning meeting obstacle. "What if," she writes,"the obstacles are the point, the measure against which we can find the depth of the yearning itself?" It seems the perfect time: A beautiful weekend; the ground is softened from the rain earlier in the week; the beginning of daylight saving time will allow for an hour of daylight after work to dig and create. And so I begin. I begin to clear away the sod and the soil, but not the roots. I begin to make an empty space for new things to happen in. I don't have to know the end, I just have to commit to the process. It will be my Lenten practice of creation; of letting go of outcome to see what emerges.

The key, I quickly discover, will be to avoid forcing my body to exhaustion. I am not good at doing things gradually once I begin them; I get in a hurry to bring projects to fruition. I have been watching the dogwood tree for the past three weeks, though. It is my lesson today. Unlike the bluebells and the translucent layers of the Japanese iris that were not there one night and blooming the next morning, the dogwood takes its sweet time opening. I stressed it two years ago when I dug post holes among its roots for my church windows.  It did not bloom well last summer. This year it is loaded with those slow to open blooms. I get the ground cover cleared with a hoe (not a blade of actual grass in the 6-foot circle). I practice ambidextrous hoeing and chopping in an attempt at left/right equal opportunity flab reduction and oblique muscle strengthening. As I begin digging up the dirt at the end of the circle farthest from the roots, I take a "break" to finally throw together a more defined compost area behind the shed (I have been thinking about doing that for four years now). If the patio had been my first project rather than the last, I would have saved a heap of money on dirt; now I don't know where I am going to put it all. I am reaching the point of exhaustion, but except for brief water breaks in the lawn rocker watching flocks of birds flit crazily in the tree tops singing as they work and play, I keep at it. I get to a few of the roots before I finally quit for the day in anticipation of another friend coming to see the garden. I don't have clarity about how the roots will work into the design; I only know I can't risk the dogwood tree by removing them. They are the original painting; they will become part of the patio pentimento.

Saturday is a day of pentimento discovery: along with the giant hosta pushing through the leaf mulch I find the Carolina jasmine that had one bloom last year has dozens of tiny yellow buds peeking from under the leaves on the evergreen vine. A new pot sits on the root of Mary's old holly bush dug up from the new rose beds, waiting in emptiness for a summer trailing geranium. The antique rose bush is covered with healthy new leaves. Lent is now. Spring is coming; slowing rising from the darkness. The old with the new. Pentimento.

People have asked me why I blog. There are many reasons, but one of them is to uncover my self--to push through the layers to find out who I am. To discover my truth; to speak my truth; to live my truth. Peek through your layers, get back to your center, search for what's there. Look for what is not there anymore. Look. See. And see again for the first time. Become a pentimento.