For the longest time I hated Trevor Hall. HATED. Correction, I didn’t hate Trevor Hall, I hated his music. Honey had started listening to him and had gone to a concert or two and I greeted her interest with a dramatic eye roll. When should would play him around the house I would mock him, singing along with an exaggerated faux accent akin to his. In hindsight I realize it was totally fine not to like his music, but it was such a jerk move to ridicule something in which my wife obviously found a lot of joy.
Fast forward a decade and I can tell you exactly what crow tastes like, because I’ve had to eat a lot of it. While it is true that Honey has seen him in concert more times and in far cooler places than me, I could make an argument that I’m actually a bigger fan. Regardless of who is the more devoted Trevor Hall fan, his music is a staple in our house and in the garden.
Honey and I have a playlist for everything. We have an ever increasing Sunday morning playlist called “Sunday Morning Coming Down” that would take a month of Sundays to listen to all the songs. We have playlists for each one of the grandchildren: Rougaroux Music, MagNOLA Music, and Marley Gras Music. Of course I have a cooking playlist for when I’m making Cajun or Creole dishes, called “First You Make A Roux…” We have a playlist for “our songs” that is simply titled Gumbo & Honey. Then there is the most recent addition to our musical repertoire, music we play while we are in the garden, called “Bearing Fruit Upward”. This is the one that has become my favorite recently.
All of the songs in the “Bearing Fruit Upward” playlist have garden, fruit, nature undertones. Some are overt like Nahko and Medicine for the People’s “Garden”, Trevor Hall’s “garden”, and John Denver’s “Garden Song”. Others are a bit more subtle like Kelsey Waldon’s “Tiger Lilies” (tip of the hat to Erin for sharing this one with us), or John Prine’s “Spanish Pipedream” (which has become less of a song and more of a road map for us). A couple are downright introspective like Adeem the Artist’s “Plot of Land” and “Love Will Find A Way” by Mike Love. All of them have their place, purpose and meaning, but none of them can hold a candle to the poem set to music by husband/wife duo Trevor and Emory Hall.
As we’ve established, Trevor is a musician and his wife emory is a photographer/artist/poet. Her contribution to our playlist is a poem she wrote and recites over music supplied by her husband. The poem is called “come sit by my garden” and it has become a sort of daily, liturgical prayer for me as I work in our garden.
let my gardens speak for me when i am gone. let them speak in colored whispers of all the beauty i have seen. and felt. and lived. let them speak of how much death had to find me; how many hard seasons it took to make me a living, breathing thing. let them speak of my seasons of growth and abundance but let them also tell of my seasons of loss and decay. let the soft, wet earth be a reminder of hardness that didn't win. of sadness that didn't calcify. of surrender that triumphed over resistance. and let the glorious, fragrant blooms speak of my life and its greatest lesson: that the beauty we make never dies.
// come sit by my garden
Amen.
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