The Knowable Unknown

For months now, I've been moving a bag of tulip and daffodil bulbs around: step to porch to shed to porch to kitchen and back to porch again. I had dug them up this past spring because they had long ago stopped flowering, a sure sign that they needed to be moved. I was supposed to replant them, but I kept procrastinating. I watched myself do this--all the way into October, and then November, which has brought with it the killing frosts. This cleared the land of any interference for sure: there was no excuse now. And if these bulbs were to live and produce again, I had to get them in the ground before it froze solid for the winter. Still, I kept procrastinating. And I knew why.

I have one very sunny border here. Most flowering plants need such full sun to thrive. So this part of my garden has grown quite dense with all my heart's desires over the course of my 16 years here. Iris, peony, rose; bleeding heart, primrose, poppy, dahlia, monkshood and mint. Not to mention the flowering bulbs. It's all packed in there together. These are all the fittest, who've survived tight quarters.

When I've wanted to add or move something in the garden that involved deep digging, I would pretty much grab the shovel, cross fingers, and go. Much as I tried to avoid it, this method had me invariably slicing into something already established, inflicting mortal wounds.

I hate this. I love Life, and I am no killer. Still, I'd routinely murder innocent, defenseless other planted things when I'd sink my spade into that earth. I couldn't stand to do it again, and this is what had me procrastinating.

Then it occurred to me: I'm a dowser. I could dowse the earth for open spaces. If a pendulum could find underground water, certainly it could find underground earth! Still, as I set out to swing it over my garden, I was skeptical: I'd never used dowsing for this. But I figured it would at least reduce my odds of doing harm, so I started swinging.

The pendulum showed me very definite yeses and nos--"Yes, dig here. No, do not dig there"--but still, when I dug at a "yes" place, I dug gingerly. I had decided in advance I would use a trowel rather than a spade. This was a good choice. It allowed me to dig precisely each time, in the very spot of the "yes."

Any actuality can be dowsed. Anything composed of energy, that is. And what isn't? Even thoughts are energy. I can't explain how dowsing works; I only know that it does. Still, I felt a little strange out there, swinging and digging, swinging and digging. But you know? The results kept me doing it.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and this pudding was flawless. Each time, every time I dowsed a Yes, then dug in that spot, I brought up nothing but rich soil--and the occasional rock. Each time, I grew more and more amazed. I know what's in that garden. There are snowdrops here and there (though, short of dowsing for them, I'm not certain exactly where). There are chives. There are grape hyacinths along the entire border. There are lots more daffodils and tulips--oh, and I forgot about the crocuses--all multiplying by the year.

I neither saw nor touched one of them. It was just as if I were digging in a brand new garden. Not a speck of harm was caused to anything, as one by one the uprooted bulbs (20 or 30 in all--it never occurred to me to count them) took their new places in the garden.

"The unknown is knowable," I thought as I worked. I thought of all the things we say we don't know and can't know. When in fact the energy is there to be read. Ask, and it will answer--not by 'hocus pocus.' Dowsing is not magic, any more than a thermometer or a clock are magic. Thermometers indicate temperature. Clocks indicate time. Dowsing tools indicate energy. What energy? Whatever energy they are instructed to indicate: water, bulbs, earth--and just about anything else.

I thought I couldn't know what was in the ground, that I would have to dig blindly. I was wrong. I just needed to ask.

There is so much more than meets the eye.