This year is different for us.
Everything has been moving at light speed, and so we’ve been taking it slow where we can.
One of those places is the garden.
This year, instead of going crazy with planting season, we’re transplanting the things we’ve already got.
Blackberries that are tip rooted, escapee strawberries, overcrowded daffodil bulbs are all getting more of the care and attention they need, without us going wild over the next plants we should buy.
This year is for reaping what we have been sowing, those plants which have proven themselves again and again and again, proliferating and sustaining us.
And that made me think of how often we deny our strengths in favor of wanting something we don’t have – something that has never proven itself in our life or even in the carefully cultivated images we try to present ourselves as.
How often I have wished to be the science or math girl, when even my most stalwart of supporters would have never counted it a particular strength of mine.
Pining for technical skills instead of practicing my particular gifts meant the most I could ever hope to achieve was to be average at both.
The garden is the same way.
Every year searching for the next latest and greatest things we have had to pull up plants which have self sown and proven their viability in our red clay. So rather than years of plentiful harvests of adapted plants, we have in fact had years and years of cruddy harvests of semi-novel things.
Don’t get me wrong, these trials have resulted in successes – but we have not always dedicated large swaths of our garden to what we know would be successful from previous trials. We still only planted out a few and had the kinds of harvests one could expect from a suburban town-home plot.
Our self-development is like that, too.
I have found that I’m more mechanically minded than I would have thought, and that compliance is far more interesting now than it was when I was 16 and my parents were telling me I couldn’t attend a party – but still, I pined for more and different.
So this year, we’re accepting the gifts the universe has provided to us, and we’re cultivating those.
We may still throw in a few tomatoes or peppers, but they’ll be ones we know that we enjoy, not ones we peeked at in a magazine and coveted for their beauty.
And in life, we’ll focus on the gifts the universe has already bestowed, reaping the benefits of those seeds long sown. We’ll cultivate around them, and pick off any pests, protect them and ensure they have what they need to grow.
We’ll take it slow.
We’ll stop wishing for what we’re not.
And we’ll bask in the gifts from our garden.
