Pruning back the garden for "winter," finally completing preparation of the new garden patch (started in September)
I yet again re-commit to not-pushing myself, to not doing anything before I'm fully ready.
As so much of the country struggles with snow, ice and freezing temperatures, this little peaceful valley begins it annual amble into spring. The perfume of “mock orange,” narcissus and some early flowering true orange fill the air, especially after the sun drops low in the sky. Sun-yellow bauble-blossoms cover the acacia trees (including the one just outside my west facing windows). Waxy coral flower-cones crown the aloe plants and a profusion of tender pink flowers decorate the ancient peach tree just outside my south facing windows. Juicy little buds begin showing on the all the sycamores. Chemise, nightshade, old man’s beard, lupine, black-eyed susan and ceanothus are jubilantly flowering up in the mountains and along the back roads.
Everything is noticeably ahead of schedule this year. Unseasonably warm days and nights–shorts and tank top weather–through most of January. Pleasant in some ways but truly more distressing as worrisome signs of the damage we continue to wreck upon our atmosphere. Sigh!
During the warm, sunny days I gradually make my way through all my little yards and gardens. The annual ceremony of pruning back roses, vines and most of my other flowering potted plants. It feels easier than it usually does, this time of cutting back all the profligate lushness, the spilling-over wildness that yearly develop in my container gardens. Somehow I am incredibly hungry this year for the crew cut, Zen spare ness of my gardens put-to-bed-for-winter (brief eye blink that it is here). I make one exception and leave the volunteer nasturtium vines flourishing so that I will still have some bright little flowers for my altars.
This season of cutting away, pruning back old growth, making space, giving the invisible, underground roots of everything time to rest and replenish seems as incredibly necessary in me as it is in the garden. The world we live in, the messages by which we are constantly surrounded seem to foster the view that “progress” or “success” or “worthiness” come only with an unwavering linear progression of more and more, bigger and bigger, further and further.
In the natural world, this is not the way. Growth is always cyclical. Things flourish and proliferate, then they die back. What dies back fertilizes and protects the roots/source of things. In the dormant time, roots rest and replenish. They assimilate the nutrients that feed the new cycle of growth that will later emerge into visibility, above ground.
Each year, the plants in my gardens come back more and more lushly after their time of rest and “inwardness.” So it is in me, as well. I grow and grow. Then I come back inside, letting go to rest, to assimilate and digest. Then I’m usually ready to grow outwardly again.
After several months, I’ve come back to the process of digging up rocks in and adding amendments to my new little vegetable patch addition. Before now, I just couldn’t seem to find the energy or interest to complete this project I’d started in September. As it happens, there was probably little lost because of the delay. I discovered, over these months in between, that the patch didn’t get very much of the lowered-in-the-southern-sky sun until the walnut tree had (just recently) finished shedding its leaves. Had I pushed myself to finish and plant before I felt ready to do it all, the seeds would have taken much longer to germinate than they will now.
I am so committed to not-pushing myself. I’ve come to trust profoundly that there is a “right time” for everything. To trust that my “not feeling up to” or “not feeling ready for” any particular process, chore or sharing-of-feelings is a sign that it is not yet the “right time” for me to be addressing whatever it might be. I choose very consciously to not be tempted to view these waiting-for-the-moment times with “outside eyes.” “Outside eyes,”–those distorted by the ambient cultural values–would view these moments as indications that I am “lazy,” “remiss,” “not true to my word” or “not being responsible.” I know this view is not the truth.
In the last week, in two separate conversations, two women I know were dealing with their reluctance, their ambivalence about moving ahead with some venture that each was considering. Somewhere in each woman’s tale of her dilemma, was the expressed concern that she was facing “one of those moments where life offers you an opportunity, which if not taken will mean the loss forever of that particular choice/path.”
I know in my bones that this, also, is not the truth. It is one of those generally accepted beliefs from the dominant paradigm with which we’ve all tyrannized ourselves. Because of this belief, I’ve often forced myself through my reluctances and my unreadinesses. Because of it, I’ve frequently felt compelled to override my own natural, organic rhythm and timing. I refuse to do this to myself anymore. I will not ride roughshod over my uneasy feelings.
In my own life and in the lives of both my friends and my clients I repeatedly experience a very different truth: When we say ”no” to some option for which we do not feel “ready yet,” or which doesn’t feel “quite right,” the Universe supports us. If it’s something we ultimately need to do or a place we truly need to go, the Universe (Spirit, our deep Self) recycles the option in another more appropriate guise at another more appropriate time. This can and does happen again and again in each of our journeys. I think we each know this truth in our bones. Yet, everything in our day-to-day world encourages us to forget this knowing. Re-membering it always helps me to be really loving, tender and gently supportive of my natural process. I do all I can to keep reminding myself of this truth. And, I try to take note of every time I see it playing out.
Originally published February 2003
