Slow Gardening

My streaks are starting to become hard and wearying. I am struggling with the yoga and I am struggling with what to write each week on the blog. 

The yoga is hard because of the time commitment and also because a lot of the practices are physically hard to do, and continue to be hard to do even after more than 60 days of consistently doing them.

I did the Strength practice the other day and thought: When will this ever get easier?? I have to approach the Balance practice with a sense of humor because it is all but impossible, and if I don’t find a way to laugh, and go easy on myself, I will just quit. 

This blog is hard for other reasons. Mainly because, until lately, I’ve not been reading anything except for newspapers. I’ve also not been consistently doing my 1K a day word dump in Scrivener. I need to develop more consistency in those two things. I need to put the iPad away and read. 

 I’m deathly sick of Facebook but find myself looking at it anyway. I’m actively resisting any urge to engage with anything or anybody. I’ve even stopped happy birthday-ing people. I want to quit it and if I didn’t have the studio I would in a heartbeat. I never leave Facebook feeling informed or uplifted. 

I’ve been feeling this really strong pull toward detachment and solitude. I keep flashing back on my yearly, sometimes more than yearly, retreats at Springwater, how I’d come home from them centered and aligned and inspired. It’s been too long. I almost have a fear of doing that now, not that I have the time for it. And I don’t know why.

I’ve been having escapist fantasies of doing yoga on the beach during my hour of practice each day, imagining lifting up into crescent lunge, opening my arms out wide, gathering it all in… 

In reality, yoga in the sand is crappy and messy and my form falls apart, but if I could find a flat stable piece of ground, that would be so nice, and then afterward, to sit and meditate there? Ahhhh….

My list of household things to do is long and my desire to do any of it is short. I just want to sit and read and write and then read again. The other day we moved the hammock stand into place in the side yard but I haven’t hung the hammock on it yet. I have some idea in my mind that I have to deserve my hammock time. That I have to fall into the hammock in a heap of exhaustion either from doing housework or yard work. There is some bug in my brain that says that lying around is self-indulgent and must be earned. 

The other day I was doing a little gardening, my first spate of gardening of the year.

I warmed up by just walking the yard, taking the measure of the season, noticing how things had survived the winter, or not.  The thing G wanted me to do was plant some marigolds in a planter in the back, but first there was some cleaning and weeding to be done. I took my weeder bucket and trake and started carefully cleaning out dead leaves and weeds, sweeping the flagstones, standing back and admiring things. I swept under the little Buddha statue and then took one of the marigolds, planted it in a little blue ceramic pot, and placed it in front of the statue, kind of like an offering. 

I am not a Buddhist. I am not a person who bows to statues. But I think what these little garden Buddhas represent, with their closed eyes and their meditative stillness is the me who wants to do that, and be like that. I want to be the one who goes into the yard to observe, and appreciate, and weed, and sweep, and call that “gardening.” Or “meditating.”

G is getting the garden done.

She is making great strides with planting and mulching and digging and doing. Whereas I take a different approach. I am more concerned with doing it in a way that slows me down, makes me pay attention to the plant I am weeding around in this moment, watching as it becomes visible as a result of my making a  weedless space around it. I prefer to garden slowly. I don’t care how long it takes. I like taking my time. 

Not a lot will get done at this pace, though. By the time I’m through, the leaves will need to be raked and the hammock again, stored for the winter.