The Garden Henchman

the sun has been beaming down on us these past few weeks. The yard is a mess, and there are a billion things to do as much outside as there is inside the house. I just need to pick my battles. First off, we don't tend to our yard. In fact, it's our very kind and meticulous neighbor who always mows our patch of moss for us. The only time I've touched our lawn mower (which came with our house 4 years ago), was just the other day when I offered it to another neighbor who was lamenting about how heavy his was. I said, 'Oh! we have one that we never use! You can borrow it ANYTIME'.

All this to say, we are not gardeners. In fact, it's the yard and house maintenance that always gets me thinking back on condo living, and how strata fees were really good in that way. But, sometimes, when things are ugly, they are just ugly. Our yard, well... is very unkept. Not even weeds. I'm talking about leaves that haven't been raked since 2010. I thought that stuff is supposed to decompose? Well, not as fast as we thought. And things grow. Fast.

So, as part of my compulsive nature, when I just can't handle a mess anymore, I kind of go off my rocker, and just go at it starting from scratch so that whatever I am trying to 'organize' is really organized.

All I wanted to do was shear some of the twigs/leaves off the bushes that were on our walkway. They started getting in the way of my grocery drop off area, so I started by shearing those off. I started to realize that you can't just get the leaves. It's the whole damn branch that needs to go. But once you get one branch, you have to even it up by getting another. Well, those bushes were getting a good makeover, but then I somehow found myself starting to do the larger greenery around our house. In front. And soon enough... there was a massive pile of yard waste, sitting in the middle of my patch of moss yard.

While doing this, I had a lot of time to think. Funny how when things are quiet (i.e. when the kids are napping), you can hear yourself think. And all I could think, was all the garden analogy in the Bible. There are several I kept thinking about, and they all reign true to life and relationships. But it was the pruning that kept worrying me. As I was on my own crazy nature massacre - just to 'clean things up' and to make our yard more enjoyable, I thought about the pruning that needs to be done on a daily basis to prevent these missions and huge steps I have to take to bring me back to 'home'.

I never tended the garden. The only way to get it back to square one, and to where things are manageable, is to cut everything off - living or dead. Even perfectly luscious greenery, had to be pruned for things to be in order. This freaked me out. The fact that perfectly good things, sometimes still had to be 'let go' so that order can be brought back.

My head and my heart are still trying to wrap my thoughts around all the things that need to be done to maintain a viable garden/life. In fact, I just went on another rampage today, after cleaning up the yard waste from my last mission. There is a sense of peace in all the chaos, and it's what I look forward to at the end of it all, but I can't say I like all of the work that had to be done to get that peace of mind. Like any Christian journey, it really is the same. Pruning sucks. But it's the only thing that leads to peace.