Tend and Gather

My garden began as any other project.

Get clear on the end goal, make the plan, start the plan. Work the plan HARD. Achieve the outcome.

Ensure the cutting patch is highly productive, make sure every bed is set up for maximum harvest and cut every stem for the maximum number of posies. Aim for 100 posies given away - beat the target if you can.

This approach totally unquestioned because that’s how I’ve done everything up until this point.

Driven, ambitious and laser-focussed.

But as the woman in my soul has begun to awaken to something softer and deeper than the conditioning and way of being that’s so celebrated in our society, I found myself tending and gathering rather than producing and cutting.

Nurturing the seedlings rather than chivvying them along.

Leaving the flowers to give back to nature and the soil, rather than cutting every one to give to people.

Less time muscling in with the wheelbarrow and garden fork; more time engaging in the sensuousness of brushing my fingers through the Corncockles, and staring at the budding flowers of the Orlaya instead of reaching for the snips. Coaxing the sweet peas up the frame; appreciating the dark reds and greens on the budding rose bushes and standing with stillness in the greenhouse and listening to the rain on the roof.

Adding perennial plants to the garden that will take a couple of years to get going but then will bloom year after year sustainably instead of always planting fast-growing showy annuals, selected for the power-surge of flowers they produce mid-summer before they set seed and die all in the space of a year.

Connecting with the soil of the garden itself, the trees around the edges and the wildflowers down in the marshy swampy corners instead of every moment being spent in the raised bed areas making more, bigger, better, faster.

And the garden slowly waking up under the hand of this woman.

THIS is the energy that is starting to unfold in the whole of my life.

In my work, with my family, in my home.

More care, less rush.

More tending what’s here now, less shaping and moulding things into a form I have decided upon.

More dancing with the flow of life, less imposing my will.

More grace, less force.

More unfolding, more openness, more observation.

I welcome this woman.

I invite her in to discover the gifts she has to offer.

Because she is losing the desire to always gain.