New soil
Cultivating what's here
A relationship is a project. Something to which both parties add energy and attention. We make a pact to jointly tend to this garden, hearth, or home.
It’s impossible to focus on each relationship at once. I’ll reconnect with someone after months or even years and find our garden in disarray. Overgrown with weeds, the plants bare or rotting.
My instinct is to pull a plant from the ground and search its roots for the problem. Stop time and start the process over from scratch.
But some of these plants are too large. Trees that have taken a lifetime to grow. I can’t begin to see where the rot is.
I still want the relationship. I still want the tree.
What if, instead of pulling it by the root, we begin to enrich it again? I bring fertilizer and water. I remove the weeds and trim back dead branches. The core is still good.
It’s no surprise that many of us are tired of therapy. We’re done with navel gazing and speaking as if rot can be traced to its root. We sit in the chair and look backward, meanwhile the world still turns. War, famine, genocide, and hatred of the other surge forth.
Instead, we’re ready for action. Less interested in looking back than in making do with what’s here. For someone who’s always asking why, I enjoy this fresh approach. Adding new soil to the plants I have without seeking to dissect them.
The why always changes. Sometimes it’s not possible to find decay at the source. Sometimes we wake up and notice a shift, and we may never get an answer for what happened. We’re changing every day, and our relationships are too. Acceptance offers more solace than attempts to control.
At the end of a tree’s life you can cut it down and read the story of its rings. Periods of growth followed by stagnation. You only get this information once it’s dead. An autopsy, a vision of the source.
We don’t have that luxury while growing our tree. Cutting it open does more damage than good. Instead, we observe what we can and ask if we want to keep it alive. If we do, we bring water and nutrients and decide what to prune back and what to feed.
There’s beauty in choosing to work on an existing garden instead of uprooting it and starting over. I recall an essay by Isabel on finding novelty within commitment:
Commitment is a gateway to the self. A way to reveal what we avoid through the relentless pursuit of novelty. That isn’t to say novelty and exploration aren’t valuable—they are. But eventually, we find something good through them. Something that makes our mind and our intuition hum in unison. Something that feels right. Something that demands commitment. And if we resist surrendering to our urge to commit—if we decide to keep exploring instead of doubling down on what clicked—we miss the opportunity to explore the riches of stillness, the container for all of life’s most valuable treasures. - Isabel of Mind Mine
We have to stay put to see what grows. Gardens have bad years and better years. Times when one plant shoots up and another seems barely living. All I can do is keep caring for them, so long as I want. And you get to do the same.
this really resonated - thank you for writing :)