Watching life unfold in real time
My daughter and I have gotten in the habit of taking a “garden tour” when she gets home from work. Our tour takes about 1/100th of the time that it would take to tour a “proper” garden like Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, PA or the Tuileries in Paris, but the happiness we get from these few minutes each evening glows.
It is invigorating to watch life unfold in real time. Noticing that in just one day a delicate flower can become a tiny cucumber or that a sunflower gently twists and turns so that it is always facing the sun gives us a little dose of awe. I don’t want to lead you astray. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns out there. The surprisingly long search that ensued after I noticed four little globs of something brown on a tomato leaf went from riveting to slightly horrifying in an instant when we found two disturbingly large and incredibly camouflaged hornworms on the plant.
What a difference a year can make
The other evening as we peered and poked at the plants we are tending, my daughter looked at me and asked, “So what happened last year?” It’s a good question. As I do annually, I drove out to Lancaster County to buy vegetable and herb seedlings. My husband helped me lug bags of organic potting mix home from the local hardware store. I pulled out my pots and spent a happy Mother’s Day tucking all the little plants into their new homes.
But looking back, I wonder about the happiness of that day. I’m pretty sure I was going through the motions; faking it in the hopes that I would feel a little of the joy I usually feel when I start my garden. While I did cut some herbs a few nights when I was cooking dinner, I never checked on my tomatoes. I never weeded a bed. I barely filled the watering can. You see that first day was also the last day that season that I really tended anything in the garden.
A different kind of tending
What was I doing instead? In my daughter’s words, “What happened last year?” Well, last winter and spring, two of my family members received cancer diagnoses. Before I had at all processed my mother’s protracted and painful death, I was thrown back into crisis mode. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I never left crisis mode. What is that expression? I hopped from the frying pan of grief into the fire of caregiving.
Caregiving is complicated. You are rising to needs of your loved one that are unfamiliar, unexpected, and wholly unwanted. You are doing so while navigating a churning sea of feelings – fear, rage, helplessness, and the conflicting, desperate desire to be able to be even a little helpful. It was this drive to be helpful that took over. So as not to get distracted, I did almost nothing to explore my feelings and anything and everything possible to meet my loved ones’ needs. In short, you could say that my self-care was as minimal as the care I was giving my garden.
So I looked back at my daughter and responded, “Last summer I was afraid. I was so afraid that being afraid was all that I could do.” I wiped away a tear as she looked away from me to check the ripeness of a banana pepper. It was not a sad tear. It was a tear of relief and perhaps even of joy. It feels so very good to not be afraid now.
Blending self-care and taking care
It feels so right (as right as it did last summer to be sitting in medical office after medical office) to be standing here with dirty fingernails participating in the simple, undramatic, wonderful unfolding of regularly scheduled life. I am deeply grateful for the fact that two hornworms constituted a “crisis” last week. I am thankful that the things that need my presence and my attention this summer are not accompanied by a raging storm of feelings, which has given me the space and the time to explore some of the feelings I had to shove to the side last year.
Mostly, I am grateful that the caregiving I’m doing now is also serving as self-care. While there is nothing I can do now for those poor neglected plants of last summer, my heart is more tenacious than they were. It is resilient, too. These weeks of lovingly watering, weeding, feeding, pruning and harvesting the resulting abundance of my garden has been good for me – body and soul, sure, but mostly for my tender and healing heart.
Taking care of yourself is good for everyone else, too
For me, to tend a garden is somehow also to tend myself. I wonder what it is that you do to tend yourself? I am certain that when we are able to do these things, we should do so. It is not selfish at all. After all, when we take the time to tend to ourselves, we are better able to “tend” to the people we love. Which is, in the end, the whole point of it all.
You might be wondering about my line above that I was so afraid last summer that all I could do was be afraid. If I couldn’t garden, does that mean I wasn’t doing any of the other things that support me? Somehow, more through grace than willpower, I was still showing up to my practices of yoga, journaling, and prayer. While none of them seemed to be “working” at the time, something in me trusted Patanjali’s wisdom that if you maintain your practice steadily over a long time it will sustain you (YS 1.14). I couldn’t see the effects of my practices last summer, but from where I am today, I know they were providing the stability and strength that they have always provided.