Yesterday’s blustery wind changed my plans for the garden. I did not stock the Free Little Garden Shop because the wind would have blown all the pots right over and off their board. It would have knocked down my sign. It would have blown the clean clothes right off the clothesline, lifted the cardboard I hoped to lay over new beds in the vegetable garden (I use a “no dig” method there,) and scattered the lighter branches of pruned trees all over the front gardens.
I did spend the day in the garden, often holding onto my hat. I did many other tasks that need doing instead of what I had planned to do. I did dig out the daisies from their bed between the two red currant bushes, and they did go into pots, but the pots stayed beneath the shelter of the blackberry vines. I waited for today to do my laundry. Instead of laying cardboard I stood in the warm greenhouse and sowed seeds for basil (Genovese, purple, and lemon;) collards; pale purple coneflowers; German chamomile; butter crunch lettuce; and another tray of micro greens. I pruned the dead branches from the elderberry bushes, the dessicated tips of the raspberries, and unwound the dead stems of bindweed from my lilacs while promising them to do better this year than I managed to do last.
“Instead” is a good word for times like these: times when I get so frustrated with what passes for governance these days that I want to impose justice and sanity to the world. “Impose” is a key word. To impose my way, even for what I would see as the good, would make me no better than those I decry now. I have work to do within my heart. So, what might I do “instead?” What new ways of being might I practice, ways that are inviting instead of imposing?
I might check in with beloveds. I might share more generously. I might celebrate the good more joyfully, and speak more authentically for justice. I might plant more blueberry bushes. I might stand more solidly for the world I want. I might listen more deeply to Mystery, to Mother Earth, to my own sacred heart, to the gladness and laments of my sisters and brothers (who are everyone, after all.) May it all be so. All this, and so much more.
Courage my dears. Love one another.
