Today dawned clear and bright and cool. After a stormy couple of days it was nice to see the sunshine and blue skies to begin the new week. The past week produced many opportunities for gratitude and I look forward to many more in the week ahead. I spent a fair amount of time today talking on the phone catching up with a best friend who’s been going through a lot in her life and with a relative who likewise has experienced a variety of emotional challenges. What impressed me about each of them is their ability to maintain some sense of equanimity throughout all that is going on. Equanimity is one of those qualities that is absolutely essential in navigating through life’s struggles. I’ve been working to cultivate it myself, and when one has multiple upheavals over a period of time, one definitely has the opportunity to do a lot of cultivation.
In keeping with the cultivating theme, as a long time gardener I can’t resist thinking about my gardens past and present. Several years ago back in Michigan, I tended to two rather large garden plots. I grew vegetables and herbs–various types of beans, all kinds of peppers, corn, peas, sunflowers, cabbages, lettuces, onions, pumpkins, tomatoes, zucchinis and other squashes, not to mention sage, thyme, oregano, chives, tarragon, etc. I loved gardening. For a while the gardens were neat, relatively weed free, carefully fenced to keep the critters out, and beautiful to behold. Then life got a bit more hectic: my job was more demanding, my kids were getting older and school activities were picking up, and my marriage was starting to unravel. I kept gardening, but eventually moved from two down to one plot, and each year as my life challenges increased, the size, quality, and appearance of my garden declined until finally I only had one small, wildly overgrown herb garden. I haven’t raised a healthy vegetable garden in many years. It’s something I aim to get back to someday.
These days I’ve been cultivating a different kind of garden. The struggles of the last year caused me to begin planting and growing gratitude, generosity, perseverance and resilience, grace and equanimity, compassion and other vital life qualities. I’ve been breaking up the hard, rocky soil of grief and loss, pulling out the weeds of unemployment, loneliness, and depression, and washing off the leaf-chomping, root destroying pests of fear, frustration and anxiety to produce the conditions that will bear fruits and flowers of joy, peace, kindness, contentment, and love. Anyone who’s ever gardened, particularly on a large scale knows that it can be hot, tiring, gritty, back and joint aching work. Sometimes the weeds and bugs look like they’re taking over and the weather can be wholly uncooperative. It can be solitary and thankless work, if like me you’re out there by yourself. And you have to be at it nearly every day because if you miss a few days of work all kinds of crazy things can pop up. Kind of makes you wonder why you planted it all in the first place. But then there’s the satisfaction and pure joy of harvesting, preparing and eating the fruits of all that work that makes every bit of it worthwhile. And you get to share the goodies with the people around you–family, friends, neighbors all get to partake of the good things that you produced.
I work hard at cultivating those qualities that will bring more joy, ease and wellbeing into my life. It is not easy. Sometimes I water the garden with tears, sometimes I watch the tender plants wither in the heat or get hit with an unexpected frost or decimated by insects and I have to start all over again. But I know that at the end of this comes the sweet payoff, so I take my pain reliever, pull my gloves and hat back on, step into my boots and get back out there. And when the day is done, I’ll sit out back and sip lemonade and look over all that I’ve accomplished and say like God did, “It is good.”
