Yesterday I went out in the garden and scattered seeds….all the seeds I had from the last two years. Chickweed, calendula, sunflower, zucchini, kale, basil and lots more. I have been receiving inspirations about how to have an authentic garden. I have been receiving messages from the garden and from my reading about others who have grown permanent gardens.
Today it is raining so hard. And it is watering my seeds!
What on earth could this mean…what on earth can this accomplish?
It doesn’t matter. It was a message I got and I followed it.
The garden appears to be a metaphor for my life. What happened two years ago was someone who was helping me in my garden quit abruptly in June. It seemed like the worst time to lose a garden helper. But it really was the best time. I had been to the Fairy Congress in Eastern Washington and had talked to a few beekeepers. When I returned I realized that the insects were communicating with me. They were instructing me with messages. In the past, when a wasp would fly near me, I would gently swat it away and ask it not to bother me. But this time after the Fairy Congress, I knew the wasp was coming near to tell me something. I listened.
So the garden helper quit and I was left with a garden that appeared to need weeding and manicuring. But that is not what I did. I freaked out for a very short time and then I got a very strong feeling that I was to not do anything in the garden, to let it grow without tending. I called this rewilding.
For two years I didn’t tend the garden. It felt weird and it also felt right. When I would go out in the garden to visit, the energy was sweet and nurturing. The garden was happy.
And the buttercup grew and the grass grew and the blackberries came in.
I thought that this was what the garden would be, a wild place to find peace.
What I started to notice about my relationship to the garden was that instead of making excuses to people about how I didn’t have time to weed and that it doesn’t look like a garden, I was teaching about rewilding. I wasn’t making excuses anymore because this garden was the authentic expression of what it desired to be.
And then I read “The Secret Teachings of the Plants” by Stephen Buhner and he referenced Masanobu Fukuoka and his book, “The One Straw Revolution”
Fukuoka talked about waking up and discovering that nature carries forth on its own without prompting from human, without disruption, and chemicals and tilling etc. He started a rice farm where he grew rice and citrus fruit without tilling, without chemicals and without even added compost. He did this for over thirty years before he wrote his book. He grew healthy rice with yields the same or greater than those who used chemicals.
He wrote about nondiscriminatory gardening and farming. He wrote about how to do less, how not to do things.
I became inspired from his writing. What he was writing about, the soil integrity, the way everything works together to make the environment work, that is what I was feeling. I am so thankful for this wisdom.
And so this year in the garden, I decided that I would begin to work and to cultivate in the energy of what was desired. Instead of pulling out grass, we cut the grass to the ground and laid the cut grass on the ground under the plants.
We also built six hugel culture beds, a way of creating a permanent garden bed that will increase in fertility over the years.
When I get anxious about what it looks like out there with all the weeds and grasses and things coming in, I listen to a deeper message. Then I can feel the vibrant life that is teeming out there. Then I can sense the inspiration of a space coming into its own.
We recently put some compost from a pile near the road that had
been breaking down for several years. With the rains have come chickweed, lamb’s quarter, kale, motherwort and other little green starts.
This garden design is a metaphor for the design of my life. Instead of making excuses for how I am, I am sharing with others about my life as a listener, to the messages that instruct me to live authentically.
May it be in Beauty.
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