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I have mentioned my garden in past columns—how much joy and life I find there and how central to my spiritual practice it is from spring through fall. I have never mentioned, however, that my next door neighbor hates my garden at least as much as I love it.

Lest you think I am being a drama queen here, let me tell you why I report this as fact. It is not because I am deeply sensitive to my neighbor’s body language, or wonder about the meaning of awkward silences when the subject of gardening comes up in conversation. In fact, I love my garden so much that it never occurred to me that someone else could hate it until the day when she looked me in the face and said baldly, “I hate your garden.” This is DEFINITELY not a typical thing for a “Minnesota nice” neighbor to say. I was flabbergasted.

Please understand that, as yard styles go, my neighbor and I are very much “The Odd Couple.” Her solution to any weed or disorder is to either apply chemicals or landscape with thousands of small rocks. She loves her lawn. I, on the other hand, don’t disturb milkweed in hopes that it will attract monarch butterflies. I am likely to let unidentified plants grow with hopes that they are something fantastic I’ve forgotten about, rather than labeling them “weeds” and eliminating them immediately. One summer I grew a whole bed of dandelions, insisting to myself that they were a unique kind of poppies. It wasn’t till they flowered that I admitted to myself that I was delusional and finally pulled them up.

So, my garden is definitely not in a style that would appeal to everyone. I do have a fan club, which I greatly appreciate, but unfortunately it does not include my neighbor. She has torn down plants that crossed the chain link fence she erected between our yards and thrown them back into my yard. (I had presumed that no one would enjoy looking at a vast expanse of chain link fence and planted attractive vines along it. It turns out she and I have vastly different opinions on this matter.)

Over the years, I have tried to figure out what she hates most and remove it. She hated my sunflowers, she said, because they made her feel unsafe in her house—someone could hide behind them and sneak up on her. I loved my sunflowers, but I didn’t want her to feel unsafe in her own house, so I took them down right in the height of their prime and never planted them in that spot again. When she’s not home, I’ve snuck into her yard to see the garden from her point of view, and I’ve worked harder to clean up the areas she looks at.

You  may have noticed that at some level I enjoy complaining about her, that I’ve snuck in just enough details here to appear balanced in my description of our differences while working to tilt your sympathy towards me. (I don’t really know if she “threw” vines into my yard; I only know I found them there.)  Anyway, one day, as I was carrying on about all this, kind of like I am now, a wise friend said, “Aren’t you a minister? Did Jesus say to love the neighbor you think you deserve, or love the neighbor you have?”

Oh. That. It made things even worse that I was wearing my bright yellow “Standing On the Side of Love” shirt that day.

The truth is, even if I’ve been adjusting my behavior and pulling up plants to please my neighbor, I have not even tried to love her. Only coming into my reflections on forgiveness for this month’s Quest did I realize that, whether I joke or whine about it or not, I am having a hard time forgiving her for hating something that I love so much. Somehow, just naming that as a fact brings some relief to the situation, the first baby step towards healing.

“Really?”  I ask myself. “You really can’t forgive someone for having different aesthetics about their yard than yours?” And I lighten up a bit, find some humor in it. “Really?” I ask myself. “This is what’s unforgiveable? This is what crosses the line of the Universalist commitment to love? Not torture or genocide, but too much Chemlawn and too many rocks?” And I have to roll my eyes at myself.

I’ll be honest. I’m not yet ready to try for conversation that leads towards constructive collaboration towards yards we both like. I’m not ready to forgive her yet, or even to forgive myself for not forgiving her.

I share this because I suspect you have a neighbor or co-worker or relative who is, in your life, what this neighbor is to me. I offer the suggestion that, for all of us, a commitment to forgiveness made in our own heart, in our own home, and on our own city block is as profoundly important for our commitment to world peace as it is for feuding nations. I love being in this community together so we can help each other remember who we are, the values we live by, our aspirations. By Yom Kippur, I vow to speak to my neighbor about the really ugly fence between us, the one we’ve each erected around our hearts. I’ll keep you posted how that goes!

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

Latest posts by Rev. Meg Riley (see all)

• From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
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