Rocked by The Mother

I returned from our week in paradise with a raging sinus/bronchial infection, so I wasn't able to jump right back in to my garden or my blog.  It was hard to drag myself out of bed to take care of the unpaid bills and unanswered emails much less get out there in the cold, damp Austin air or locate any words worth writing in my congested head.    

While we were away Austin was hit by a hard freeze.  Our housesitter did a good job saving the lettuce and the potted tropicals, but there are telltale signs of the stress all around us. The cactus, aloe plants, airplane plant, Christmas cactus and ginger, droopy and beaten, seem to be saying, "Thanks a lot.  While you were oohing and aahing over that poinsettia tree and drinking Pina Coladas, we were freezing our buns off here and were left to fend for ourselves, unprotected!"  No one takes care of your children like you do and I have all the requisite mother guilt after grabbing six days for myself.  I've learned from years past that some of them will still come back and for those that don't make it, there is a wonderful nursery a mile away just waiting for me to adopt one of their babies for a very reasonable fee.

Waking everyday to feast my eyes on the Caribbean and being rocked to sleep by the wind in the palms each night reinforced this path that I am on.  Some fundamental part of me is nurtured by nature and I have drifted away from Her.  I follow the trail of tasks and projects that feed my body and other important longings - to serve the community, to connect with friends and family, to do meaningful work - but I sometimes end up feeling lost in the wilderness.

I don't have to fly away to a tropical island to find my way back.  Sure it helps to have uninterrupted days of endless ocean, warm sun and three dimensional stars.  But I can be rocked by Mother Earth right here, and let that rhythm help me find my center again. 

I opened the book "Heart Steps - Prayers and Declarations for a Creative Life" by Julia Cameron today - looking for inspiration.  These are her words.  

All of Life is My Mentor   

I honor the wisdom of life.  I learn from Life in all its forms.  The tree teaches me.  The sparrow and the wren sing my songs.  I am open to the lessons Life brings to me from the earth.  I learn from the wind, from the sun, from the small flowers, and from the stars.  I walk without arrogance.  I learn from all I encounter.  I open my mind and my heart to the guidance and love that come from the natural world. 

"had just settled down for a long winter's nap"

As soon as I got out of bed this morning I gathered a pile of gardening clothes - the beat up old pants and tshirt, permanently stained socks and baseball cap that I always wear for yard work - and carried them downstairs with me. Already my commitment to this blog is changing my behavior and patterns. Quite often I stay in my robe and start doing business before the tea water has even boiled, with every intention of going to the gym after I "get a few things done", only to end up five hours later with no exercise, never made the bed, still in my sweat pants and sleep shirt and frustrated even though I took care of 1001 things. But I didn't take care of myself.

Today I did attend to some urgent business matters, but my eye was on the window looking out on the "farm". We live in south Austin and have a plot of land 60'x130' that slopes down to the street. Our house sits in the middle of it - I hear that's great feng shui . Our place is far from manicured, has a vegetable garden of raised beds with lots of wayward plants growing among them, a windmill, a three bin compost pile, uber bamboo that is constantly marching towards the center of our universe from the perimeter of our property, a gnarly, beautiful old cedar tree that has fallen to its side and is being propped up by a "y" shaped branch wedged into it, a storage building that we call the outhouse, various fire pits and chimineas, mismatched lawn furniture, the wrought iron arch that we were married under....you get the picture.

So I kept my eye on the prize and my pile of gardening clothes, keeping in mind the six followers I already have for my blog! By 11AM I was out there with my hands in the soil. A breakthrough change in priorities for me.

I spent my hour cutting back the freeze damage in one bed - the Hibiscus, Mexican Heather, a flowering vine that was now a dried, brown stalk winding its way around the iron shelves where I keep my extra pots. I noticed that when I first began the work, my mind was flitting from one potential project to another. "Maybe I should go work in the shade garden"; "I need to pick up those sticks in the front yard"; "I ought to go to Home Depot and get some mulch". I recognize the pattern - the restless mind that I struggle with when I sit down to meditate, when I work in my office and keep hopping from one project to another, when I start to work on a song and have a hard time staying with it long enough to let it evolve. But in the garden the smell of the earth, the breeze on my face, the obvious needs of the plant in my hands keeps me there, grounds me long enough to slow down into that moment and before I know it I have tended to an entire bed and I can step back and see tangible progress.

When we first moved in here, 10 years ago now, I planted a Euryops in our backyard. I didn't grok the whole perennial thing yet, and when it died back in December and turned brown, I yanked it out and felt like a failure. I've never been very patient - I want to see results or move on. I know better now and when my perennials need to hibernate for the winter and take a break from all that showy flowery stuff, I let them and support them by getting rid of their excess baggage and surrounding them with an extra layer of mulch for warmth during their little winter nap.

Hmmmm...sounds like exactly what I need.

Winter Solstice

As grows the garden, so goes my life. That has always been the case. If I am too busy to be tending the natural world around me, then chances are my personal world is way out of balance. For several years I have had a deep yearning to spend one entire spin around the sun taking at least a few minutes everyday to dig my hands in some earth and chronicle the growth that takes place on the vine and in my heart. Today - Winter Solstice 2009 - seems like the perfect time to begin this journey. Last night I gathered with some friends to celebrate the solstice and we wrote our wishes on a yule log. My wish was a simple drawing of a tree. To me, in that moment, it represented earth, nature, creativity, writing, health, simplicity - all the things that my busy, over active life has been pulling me away from. I know that I can move closer to all of it with one commitment - my daily garden blog.

I live in south Austin, Texas. We're in our "cold" season - an occasional 30 degrees at night, lots of 40's-60's. A couple of freezes have turned my Esperanza and Hibiscus into brown stalks but the lettuce in the vegetable garden is thriving and blessing us with a perpetual salad bar in our own backyard.

But this blog is more about my interior world and the transformation that arises when I dig in the earth. I am relatively new to gardening and not much of an expert. But I love how I feel when I am out there following my intuition about what needs my attention the most and especially how I feel after moving, breathing, digging, trimming, singing, reaching, pulling, planting, raking, hauling...Creative insights always come to me; I am a songwriter and lyrics and melodies start to flow. My worries and anxiety melt into the water that pours from my hose, or I can throw stuff around and vent some rage without anyone noticing.

I have wondered - if I gave myself permission to do at least one little garden task everyday for a year, how would my garden change and blossom and how would I? It's time to find out.

Today my time in the garden consisted of walking past it on my way to do Christmas errands and looking at the weeds in the front bed while making business calls from the deck. I did water the house plants and I felt a rush of pride just getting that done.

I make no promises as I begin this. It's as much an exercise/experiment in commitment as it is a chronicle of the seasons in my garden. It's one woman saying "yes" to something that doesn't pay the bills, knock much off the to-do list or further the career. But those garden fairies are calling me out to play and the muse is calling me to write about it. And anyway, it's not nice to fool Mother Nature, so I think I'll surrender to what she's asking.