I was in the garden pulling weeds and talking to my mom on the phone a couple of weeks ago.
I had just gotten some snazzy cordless earbuds to help with Zoom meetings and podcast/music listening, and relational gardening.
The earbuds came out at about 7:30pm.
At 9pm when I prepared for another Zoom call, I could not remember where I placed them.
I searched everywhere, outside and inside.
By 9:01 pm I entertained the idea that the earbuds had been taken from our premissis without persmission.
I began to suspect that someone had come by the driveway and had seen them sitting on the car or our patio table and taken them. This kind of theory of Invisible thief or enemy had been planted (like kudzu or poison ivy or some other pesky invasive plant) in me early on. Maybe it was planted by family, neighborhood friends, media, or personality type six on the enneagram. Whatever you call it, for me, imagined threats can easily be drawn up in my mind.
These seeds planted in my younger years are nutured today by social media stories of trouble and threat.
You may know of a few of these fear sowers.
Before sleep, I retraced my steps for the 10th time, and one of my tech savvy children suggested that I try the “Find My Device” phone app.
Bright and early the next morning, I woke up to walk the dog and was frustrated that I still could not find my earbuds. Is it even possible to exercise without music or a nifty podcast? My online connections were disrupted last night and now my very health was on the line.
Then I remembered the wise advice from my child. My phone might have some clues. I tried the “Find My Device” app, and it revealed my location. Yes I was at home. Then floating mysteriously on a picture of a local map I found the missing earbuds.
Right there.
In some woods behind the local Kentucky Fried Chicken.
And my seeds of suspicions were confirmed again by my trusted phone. The world was not alright—the twisted vine grew in me a bit more.
Curiosity and indignation got the better of me, and I jumped in the car before the more sensible people in my house could wake up. There was a little street of new houses near the Kentucky Fried woods and my phone was telling me with its satellite precision that my earbuds were somewhere just behind the third house on the street.
I parked, heartbeat quickened and I slowly walked to the deadend of the street. My attention bobbed between the phone homing beacon held in my hand and the tangled woods lurking from above and between homes.
I was trying to act normal as I turned around to walk the street a second time at 7ish in the morning. I thought I was doing a pretty good job, but then I noticed that people began to come out of their homes to check the mail or let the dog out. People looked at me in a funny way, like I was the one acting suspicious or something!!!
While I was busy trying to act “normal,” I was planting seeds of mistrust and suspicion in this little neighborhood.
Across the street from House #3, a woman was standing in the middle of a bouquet. The garden in her yard was a vivid array of flora color and texture. She called out a greeting to me over the noise of the water hose, and we began to talk. I told her the story of the missing earbuds.
She said that she had moved from Chicago and while she felt safer here in Western North Carolina “there was still reason to be wary.” She had heard that “when this neighborhood was built a few years prior people had lived in those woods.” She shared a couple of other stories of trouble to affirm my hunches, and I walked back to my car while still hoping to find a path into the woods.
I found NOTHING except an affirmation of what I had feared without any actual evidence. I had shared my suspicions and exported my fears.
By mid-morning I was at home again.
I found my earbuds on the bookshelf, apparently just where I left them the night before.
I was relieved and embarrassed, I read the fine print on that “Find My Device” app that stated that the location was give or take about 1 1/2 miles. Not as precise as I had thought.
All was solved. No thieves were lurking on the porch or near the KFC—I could ZOOM and walk again with delightful vigor.
While driving later that day I pulled up to the traffic light next to Notorious KFC. I glanced up the hill to the woods and my body reacted. Not to the scent of 11 herbs and spices pouring out of the Colonel Sanders cafe. It was something else.
Like an entangled whisper.
“You are close to a dangerous place full of thieves."
My body tensed, on high alert for any potential threat.
I told myself “I had my earbuds.” “Any threat regarding those woods were literally imagined.” The whisper followed me throughout the day, and I knew that the issue had not been put to rest. I had nourished the seeds of fear, and it had grown out of my mind to include my body and parts of the neighborhood I had visited.
I needed to do a little contact tracing on my fear.
I had exposed the mail checkers and dog walkers and the flower gardener.
My family had been a bit entangled in the screenplay I created regarding the lost buds. But it was the gardener that troubled me the most.
I had fed the shadow, the mistrust, the otherizing. It had clearly danced around in my head and my body and reminded me that what began as curiosity and fear grew to include vines of mistrust, tendrils of violence, vigilante righteousness, and the propensity to find an enemy. But it was not satisfied twisting around in my head and heart alone. It had been loosed into the world, though quietly. That is how it starts with me. Quietly. In me, fear loves to grow slowly, to gradually weigh down my thoughts and practices.
I kept thinking about that garden, the woman, and the ways she shared things about her neighborhood. I could imagine her sharing my story with her neighbors as they strolled by her garden. “You know, the Smartest Phone said that man’s stolen goods were right behind your house.”
What had I planted in that neighborhood?
A couple of weeks after the great airpod hunt of 2021, I knocked on the glass door of the gardener’s house. I stood as far back on the porch as I could so she would not see me as a threat. She cracked open the door with a puzzled look and I pulled my mask down.
“I met you a couple of weeks ago, I had lost my ear buds…”
“Oh yes” and she stepped out onto the front porch.
She looked at what I held in my hands and declared, “that is one of my favorite plants! A Scabiosa!”
I handed the pot to her, while the purple pin cushion buds gently nodded in affirmation of the exchange.
And then…
After hearing my confession about collaborating in the growth of the shadow and malignant fear…
…and my apology and lament,
…after hearing the true story,
She gently held up the purple bedazzled plant and smiled.
“I can’t wait to find a good place to plant this.”
May it be so…
Scott Hardin-Nieri is an ordained pastor with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and has served as a pastor in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Fort Collins, Colo., as well as in Spring and Houston, Texas. Scott enjoys accompanying people during transformative experiences, whether during hikes, spiritual direction, wilderness quests, stories shared, service learning trips, live music concerts, camps or retreats.
