Marc Hamer’s explorations of his life in Spring Rain is beautiful, scattered with childhood tension and rooted with adult understandings, and ultimately, love. I first came across Hamer with an earlier book of his — How To Catch A Mole — and I loved it for its language, and feeling, and compassion. And Hamer’s voice.
Life is infinitely creative — gardening is the same as painting, as writing, as dancing. The garden I made is this book; this book I wrote is a garden.” – Marc Hamer, Spring Rain, page 192
In Spring Rain, he explores two parts of life story — where he is now, in a loving relationship and connected to the soil after retirement as a gardener, and his difficult childhood, where he explains how his solitary personality and creative spirit runs afoul of his father, so much so that tension and thoughts of escape fill his early years.
That part of the story, his difficult and isolated childhood, is told in third person, giving some distance to the boy who came to love the wildness of the places he lived in and refused the rules of society. One early element of his story is that of an old shed, where Hamer spent much of his childhood (often to escape his father — called The Angry Dog in the book), particularly after discovering an old set of encyclopedias in the shed, books which open up the world to his young eyes.
Of course, Hamer is not just a gardener, but also a poet and writer and a visual artist, so his ability to craft splendid observations of the natural world, and our roles as humans within it, make for some eloquent and poetic sentences that can take your breath away.
He is at times very descriptive of how to attend to nature, in gardens and beyond, to encourage the wild of the world, and his philosophical take on what it means to be traveler here is rooted in the Earth itself.
This body is not yours, it is nature’s. This mind that calls your body yours is not your mind, it belongs to nature. None of this is you or yours, it all nature expressing itself; there is no ‘you’ that is anything more than nature – nature singing its wonderful song. It breathes you into the world, and you are just a single breath. All things in nature arise, then fall: this is you. — Marc Hamer, Spring Rains, page 160
Hamer’s slim book is one that invites a slow, thoughtful reading. This is something my friend, Terry, taught me when I sent him my copy of How To Catch A Mole (because I thought of Terry as I read Hamer) and so I read Spring Rains in bits, over more time than I might normally have done, to let it sit with me.
And what bloomed, by the end, in Hamer’s garden was hope and acceptance, and love.
Peace (seeded in soil),
Kevin