Trusting intuition

I am in the garden, covering the plants by moonlight. It is 10 p.m. It’s not that I didn’t think of it before, it’s just that each time I thought about it, I asked Stephen, who is the one who pays attention to weather in our family, whether there would be frost.

There’s nothing in the forecast, he tells me, and offers to check for frost warnings on the web. For the third time, he tells me that the low for the week will be 40 degrees.

In and out of the back porch all evening, busy with refreshments for tomorrow’s Upper Delaware River Roundtable meeting, the air feels chilly. I check the thermometer; it reads 40 degrees.

“It’s going to freeze tonight,” I say to myself and I think about how I will feel in the morning, with the whole of the pepper harvest--cubanos, cherry, jalapenos and salsa--damaged. Could I actually stand there and whine, “But you said it wasn’t going to freeze.”

And then as if by magic, I finally heard myself, changed my shoes, put on my coat and fetched the sheets from the laundry room.

“There is too much at stake,” I said to myself.

Some 20 minutes later, with those precious plants covered, I am back inside, thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I have been reading this week in my Unitarian Universalist Theology class. He puts forth that our intuition is more precious that the wisdom of the sages. The ultimate source, he says, of truth is within ourselves.

His philosophy of a belief in oneself came at a time when he was fighting for his own sense of self-worth. Self-Reliance was written in 1841, three years after a Harvard Divinity School Address where his claims that the doctrine of the God was within had cost him a potential job at Harvard. He had left the ministry a few years earlier, feeling that he was not suited to it and had lost his young wife, whom he loved deeply, to tuberculosis after 18 months of marriage. Deep in a career and personal crisis, he hung onto the idea that his soul, and the soul of every person, would transcend his situation.

In an essay called The Over Soul, he wrote: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which each part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

I'm not sure exactly how not risking covering the garden plants, because the weather predictors say there will be no frost, exactly relates to the existence of an eternal One, accessed through our souls. But there is something to be said about trusting our intuition and taking responsibility for the decisions that we make, no matter what our technology or our experts happen to be telling us.