Clearing the Brambles and the Weeds

I'm a gardener. I have been drawn to plants and gardens since I was a very small child. I used to follow my father around in the garden, pulling carrots out of the ground and eating them, sharing the cucumbers and tomatoes with my siblings. As I got older, I used to help my dad in the fields, taking the measurements and data he needed to move forward with his hop research. I was always attracted to flowers, fountains and nature, anything that resonated with the pulse and beauty of the earth. When I first moved out of my parents house, a week before I graduated from high school, the first thing I did at my new house was plant a garden. I planted corn, tomatoes, herbs and lemon cucumbers. I had so much produce, I went to the local co-op to see if they'd buy some off of me, as I considered myself a local farmer. When I entered the University, I became entranced with Native American culture, specifically how they used native plants for healing and medicine. I was studying Cultural Anthropology and also taking botany classes. I loved being outdoors, hunting for plants to either identify or to work with to make medicines and tonics, dyes and foods. I ended up with a degree in Anthropology with an emphasis on Ethnobotany, specifically medicinal uses of plants. This fascination with gardening, growing things, and creating beautiful spaces has never left me. I had started to study to be a landscape architect when I was living in San Francisco, but after I moved to Davis, there was no program here to further my career, and so I continued studying on my own, creating my own beautiful gardens filled with flowers and herbs and vegetables, and advising my friends and fellow homeowners on plants that would work for their landscapes. As I move forward now with this transition in my life, I find myself drawn more and more to my garden each day. I feel I can't breathe deeply enough until I've spent at least an hour talking to my plants, feeling the soil on my feet and hands and pulling the weeds that threaten to choke them out and take over the garden. Its my meditation, my church, my connection to Spirit, and it revives me every time. It has helped me to look at my life in a similar way. Things have gotten so out of balance that the weeds of my career have threatened to choke out the fragile beauty of the flowers of my soul. I have spent so much time worrying about what will help others, I forgot to fertilize my own creative garden. The neglect is evident with the amount of brambles that have covered my own internal sacred space. I am taking the lessons of my real life garden and applying it to my soul. Little by little, gently, and patiently, I am able to find the weeds, and pull them out by the roots so they can no longer threaten me. Its an arduous task, one that causes many who start their own garden to throw up their hands in exasperation, back pain and impatience and just walk away, preferring instead to go to the store to buy vegetables flowers and herbs from someone else who spent the time and the energy working the soil to bring forth abundance and beauty. I have found though, despite the hours of labor, that the rewards of weeding your own garden, nourishing the soil, tilling, and planting yields rewards so immense, so deep, that the pride and the pleasure one feels is impossible to compare to any other experience. It never stops though, once you clear the soil of visible weeds, the seeds of more weeds always sprout, so dilligensce is vital. I bless the process for the bounty it brings in the end. I will not be able to make it through this growing season without keeping in mind the harvest and abundance at the end of this season and cycle of life.