Category Archives: staying present

Apr26

Gardening

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Gardening

I’ve planted my Spring Garden. This year, I may not get a summer garden, as the retaining wall between my house & my neighbors’ needs to be replaced. That means the location of my current garden will be unavailable to me come July.

That’s OK though. I can always plant in a container. In fact, I plan to put some tomato plants in a container here in the next couple of weeks. See, that’s one of the things I love about gardening: plants will grow pretty much regardless of what you do or don’t do. Once the soil is prepared and the seedlings planted, there isn’t a lot more for me to do.

Keep an eye on them to make sure they aren’t being “pestered” by bugs. Water (when there isn’t enough rain!) Pull a few weeds here and there so they don’t get crowded out. And then, harvest. Lovely little baby lettuce leaves, arugula and those tomatoes will make a nice salad.

Couldn’t my life be this way? Like a garden? No garden responds well to “over-doing”. If I water more than is necessary, the plants could drown. If I constantly handled the plants to make sure they were OK, the leaves would get bruised and the fruit could fall off prematurely. But I find myself “over-doing” my life sometimes.

Over-analyzing. Worrying too much. Building up big expectations, only to be disappointed at the outcome and myself. Living in the dreamworld of “what if’s” rather than with my feet solidly planted in the soil of the here and now.

My garden has incredible resiliency. And it doesn’t take a whole heck of a lot of worry or coddling or fear-driven thinking to grow. In fact, pretty much none. I noticed that one of my baby lettuces had been uprooted the other day. I paused for a moment thinking, “should I just toss it? It probably won’t survive.” But, I took the risk of putting it back into the ground. The next day, it looked as though it had never been uprooted: perky green leaves greeted me when I checked.

How many times have I given up on something – or on myself—when all I really needed was to get grounded again, to trust that my roots will nourish me? The garden takes very little worry – what it does require is trust. Trust in the power of Nature.

I make this commitment to myself: I trust that what I need will be there for me; that, like my garden, I can stay rooted in my sense of self and know that nourishment is available if I seek it. I trust that I will continue to grow.

Could your life be like a garden?

Mar25

Trusting the Process

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Trusting the Process

Trusting the process is, in essence, the act of trusting yourself. Maybe that’s why it feels so hard, sometimes. We shy away from trusting ourselves – often because we focus on mistakes or “bad” decisions/judgment calls we’ve made in the past (like, yesterday). It’s hard for me to trust myself when I remember my failed relationships, the debt I’ve racked up, the jobs I’ve held that stressed me out so much they made me sick (literally). Our “inner critic” can be so loud sometimes that we get stuck where we are, reliving over and over the messes we’ve created, the things we can’t forgive ourselves for.

But the very idea of trusting the process is rooted in the notion that we are not stagnant. We are not stuck in the past, doomed to continue making the same mistakes or decisions that do not serve us. The first step to trusting the process is remembering that LIFE is a process. The second step? That, as living beings, WE are a process.

I’m sitting in my backyard as I write this and the process Nature goes through — renewing herself yet again at this time of year– strikes me. The process of pushing buds out into flowers, followed by leaves; the process of insects emerging from their hidey-holes into the light of day; the process of birds returning North to fill our skies with song.

Nature trusts her process.

What would it be like for you if you trusted that you could make choices that were different, were right for you? How different could life be if you allowed mistakes as a part of the process, pausing to admire the learning along the way?

The flower blossoms don’t stay on the cherry trees forever (much as I wish they would). In Nature’s process they are joined by leaves and eventually become fruit. What fruits will you harvest when you trust your process and let go of the wilted flowers of your past?

What becomes possible for you?