Feeling Whole
Back when the first sprouts of Spring poked out of the ground I made a decision. I decided that this was not a year for me to stress over gardening. There were too many other things in my life and so I did not even try. I didn’t plant vegetables. I handed off the lawn mowing to the two oldest kids. I hardly even went outside. This was critically necessary during the insane Springtime months. It remained necessary during the busy summer. It was the right choice. I didn’t even miss it, or so I told myself. True, I did not spend time looking longingly at the garden and wishing to weed, what I did instead was feel depressed. Every time I walked past the weeds in my front yard, I felt a small twinge of failure. This was greatly alleviated when my mother came to visit and gave my front garden a make-over. That lifted my spirits immeasurably, which should have told me something.
I took the lifted spirits and went back to working a lot. Even when business activities slowed down this Fall, I found myself emotionally tangled by parenting responsibilities. I continued to ignore the lawn and garden. But Kiki has also been having a rough time, which meant that the back lawn got longer and longer. This morning I hauled out the mower. I mowed the edges, then Link mowed the middle. I thought it was just something that needed done, a chore. But as I mowed past all the plants in my back garden, thoughts and plans rolled over me. I have a relationship with all the green things which surround my house. I have tended them. Most of them, even the trees, I dug holes for and planted with my own hands. They are all wrapped up with memories and plans and dreams. I feel bad when I see them struggling. I feel joy when I see them thriving. Just being outside reminded me of all this. When I handed over the mower, I stayed outside to pick up the pears that had fallen to the ground. I looked up at the pear tree I planted with my own hands. It dwarfs me now.
How is it that I keep forgetting gardening is solace to my soul? I keep forgetting that time spent outside in my garden adds light and peace to my life. There will be times when I am too busy, but when I am not busy, I need to get out there. I need to be in the sunlight touching the plants, digging the dirt, breathing outside air.
The best thing about gardening is that the plants do not sit idle while I am too busy to tend them. They grow and struggle and find ways to thrive. Such is the case with the grapevine I planted 5 years ago. I planted it, but never quite built the arbor I intended for it. So it mounded and ran along the ground, then up a bush. I’ve paid it some passing attention. We picked the grapes we found last year, but many of them had been eaten by birds. This is because the birds know a good thing when they find it. These are delicious grapes. Once I was done picking up pears (two boxes and more still on the tree), I sent Kiki out with a pair of scissors and instructions to pick all the grapes. She kept coming back in for additional bowls. In the end we had four big bowls full.
It was far more grapes than we can eat before they go bad. So I pulled out my food dryer and arranged grapes to be dried into raisins. All Fall I’ve been telling myself that I don’t have time for this kind of thing. That canning and food drying are more trouble than they are worth to me. From a financial standpoint this is true. However I found immense satisfaction from washing and prepping grapes, even more so because I know these are grapes from a vine I planted with my own hands. This kind of task connects me with my ground and with the generations of food-storing women who came before me. It reminds me that all my blogging, and computing, and inventory keeping should only be part of who I am. Computer time is all eyes and brain. My life needs to contain activities with smells, tastes, and touches as well. I need to spend time hot, cold, sticky, sweaty, dirty, all of which sound unpleasant in bare words, but all of which can contribute to a feeling of wholeness, of well being.
I know not everyone has the emotional connection with plants and gardening that I do. Not everyone can find wholeness pulling weeds. But I think everyone does have something that fills them up. We just need to not forget it. We need to make time for it, what ever “it” may be. Because, as I rediscovered today, time spent in a wholeness activity adds energy to everything else. Even while it uses up time, it makes accomplishing everything else more possible.