Gentle Gardener
Longing for the Garden - Song Stories, Part 2
“Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards…” (Song of Solomon 2:15)
“Gentle Gardener” is a song of surrender to the One who invites us to take that painful first step out of disintegration and into wholeness. He is the one who prunes and tills up the overgrown, hardened places so that new life can bloom.
If you read the album overview I posted a few weeks ago, you might remember the dream my husband had before we were married. Because it is so integral to “Gentle Gardener,” I’ll share the dream again:
Our daughters Lily and Ruby on the Gentle Gardener single artwork
I was caught in a burned-out tree trunk deep in a forest that had been devastated by fire. In the dream, he offered his hand to me, but when I took it and began to step out towards him, the bark tore my skin and I wept - the painful first step. He held on and I kept moving towards him, and when my foot touched the forest floor, moss and small flowers began to grow up from the ground - new life, where there had been devastation.
That dream has stayed with us throughout our marriage, and we’ve taken on different roles in its story during different seasons. During the dark decade that was Andrew’s Lyme disease journey and his mother’s illness, I was the one holding out my hand to him. There have been seasons when we’ve each had to reach out for the other again - reminding each other that there can be beautiful things birthed out of pain.
More often than anything, we’ve both been stuck in the tree trunk, and it was the Lord who held out his hand to us.
The 2nd pre-chorus is my favorite part:
“You are catching all the foxes in the vineyard/As you clear new pathways thru the burned-out wood/Where the trees that fell in all the desolation/Display new growth I never dreamed they could.”
While the garden narrative ties in with the album’s theme, the deeper meaning is actually pointing to our creator’s amazing design of neuroplasticity, and how mine and my husband’s neural pathways have begun to heal and create new connections after engaging our stories of trauma and saying “yes” to the healing journey he invited us to - stepping out of the burned-out forest and into new life.
This song is dedicated to our daughters, Lily and Ruby - you can see them running hand in hand through an open gate on the single artwork and hear their sweet laughter at the track’s end.