Weeding (Ourselves)
For years I wanted to have a garden. My husband helped me make this dream come true. We built a large lattice enclosed structure to keep the deer out and designed the boxes with wire on the bottom to keep the underground munchers from eating all the goodies. It’s been beautiful.
Recently though I decided to plant some flowers and ornamental grasses in some plots surrounding the walkways to our home. These plots were filled with weeds and crabgrass and dirt that was riddled with rocks and clay. It was a rough go just to pick axe and shovel the old grass and larger rocks out, and yet with a little tenacity it was completed.
I hand selected some large boulders that we had unearthed the year before and spent a couple days scrubbing and washing boulders until beautiful colors and patterns emerged. I found this part especially gratifying. These rather large rocks were the first to set the stage in the pretty little gardens I was about to create.
Mixed some soil into our ruddy dirt and off to the nursery I went. It was like being a kid in a candy store! There were so many amazing plants and I wanted them all! Instead I methodically paired groundcovers with taller flowers and grasses and carried them to their new forever home.
Of course once I began planting I quickly realized I hadn’t gotten nearly enough to fill the spaces and made another kid in a candy store trip just days later.
I placed and moved and changed plants around until the configuration felt like it had a nice flow.
Aahhh… so beautiful.
And then… the grass came back.
I weeded the stubborn grass roots out. The next day I weeded more stubborn grass roots out and on and on it went. Watering and nurturing and… weeding.
In those quiet moments caring for our new little gardens, I’ve reflected on much.
When we’re ridding ourselves of bad habits, it takes the time and patience of weeding our gardens. As we bloom with each new cycle we always have new weeds to remove – stray seeds dropped from the bottoms of birds or old roots that lie deep underground find their way to the surface where we must pluck them once more or become overgrown.
In the beginning this weeding is tedious. Tons of them keep popping up, but with some loving diligence we thin the landscape leaving only what we beauty we desire.
Changing bad habits is no different. Negative thoughts and ingrained patterns surface at an overwhelming rate when you first prepare the space and it can feel like we’ll never become the new us with the better habit. It’s simply not true though. We can and we will – one weed at a time!
Each day this attentiveness pays off and before we know it there’s only a few weeds sneaking out.
Just pick ‘em out!
If it doesn’t belong, get rid of it. It’s not that hard; it just takes consistency.
Even when our gardens near perfection, there’ll always be weeds, period. It’s just the nature of things, but it doesn’t need to stop us from being the designer of our own heavenly landscape – both inside and out.