I’m in heaven at the moment, watching all the wonderful plants and flowers start to pop up in my garden. Five years ago, my niece wanted to have her wedding pictures taken in my back yard so I set out to re-landscape and have watched it develop and fill out until now I am simply in awe of the amazing things that happen when you plant and tend to a garden.
I must admit, I’m not the garden tender, except indirectly. I pay a wonderful woman named Marie-Theres to do that part, as I learned many years ago that I didn’t have a green thumb for plants. I can help people grow into the lives they would love to live, but when it comes to plants, encouragement is about all I can offer!
Watching the plants bud first then sort of explode into something has sent me into noticing how similar our experiences are to what happens with plants–especially in the way we work and work on something, allow the cycle of nature to complete itself, then we get the big reward of new growth. When I am impatient, try to hurry things along, I find that all I get is stress. The process takes as long as it takes.
So, if I step back and really observe myself, I can see that my frustrating moments in life are a little like a plant trying to push itself up out of the soil–takes a lot of effort, and how do we know whether the plant feels that or not? And once it has pushed through, the roots continue to deepen, the greenery unfolds itself, and the buds don’t show up until the weather conditions warrant a safe environment.
Sometimes we get a false signal, just like plants when an early warm spell brings out blooms before the weather has truly settled into spring, and many times those blooms don’t last because of frost. In the same way I have seen myself project my imagination forward and thought I saw what I wanted and made up a story about it, only to realize I had jumped the gun and not been aware of the whole picture. Which led to disappointment, killing off the bloom of possibility for that moment.
We can do all the right things, plant our seeds at the right time of the year, water and fertilize them, be patient and let them grow, clean out the weeds that pop up around them, stay with our process and very likely we will get what we desire. However, sometimes, no matter how hard we try, the plant just doesn’t grow right and we have to let it die off.
Isn’t that true of ideas, projects and relationships? If we could be detached enough, could we see that we are in a process of constant renewal? That sometimes our blossoms don’t come to fruition, but we still have the possibility of more in the future? Would we be more likely to take set-backs in stride and just see ourselves continually moving forward?