Working In The Garden

So I was out working in the garden today. I had a ton of weeding to do, as you can see from the picture to the left. In fact, I was afraid the garden was mostly weeds, but I was pleased when I found many plants I’d planted as well. The weeds were just more noticeable.

One of my greatest desires is to never have to weed again. All right, so that’s not entirely realistic unless I hire gardening staff. And that’s REALLY not realistic. So until I win the lottery, the weeding must be done.

If I don’t weed, the plants I want in my garden will get choked out. On the other hand, I’ll never get all of the weeds out of the garden. I have a garden intentionally planted to be wild. It’s full of plants that swarm and invade and takeover (see note above about never weeding again). It’s hard to tell the plants from the weeds, because the plants I planted are weeds in somebody else’s garden. And because of the way my plants spread, if I’m too diligent about getting the weeds out, I run the risk of pulling out the intentional plants as well. (sounds like a parable, doesn’t it?)

While I worked, my well-meaning neighbor came over and told me that I should just mow the whole thing and give up. But I told him, no. There are a lot of beautiful plants in my garden. It’s just that you can’t always tell until they start blooming.

That’s when it occurred to me that my garden is a lot like my life. I look at it sometimes and I only see weeds, because the weeds are the most noticeable. I’ll always have some weeds, because I can’t pull them all out without damaging something I want to cultivate. But many of the plants I think are weeds now will turn out to be flowers later. I’m certainly not going to give up and mow them down.

Happy Mother’s day everyone! May your your gardens turn out to be more beautiful than you ever expected.