Tis the Growing Season

Everywhere I look now, I see the green of spring, pretty petalled flowers and their stems, leaves unfolding on trees, and little shoots coming up in the garden. And bigger plants that were started as seedlings. And while refreshing the flower beds this spring, sharing some of the overgrowth with fellow gardeners. Soon the weeds will come too, unfortunately.

Our own garden beds

We’ve got an extra bed for plants this year, besides our own two raised ones in our backyard. A church not far from ours has expanded their community garden and I thought I’d like to try it out this year. That bed is planted too, just last week, so the seeds are doing their thing, germinating underground, I hope, and the tiny onion sets are beginning to poke a stem through the soil. It’s an experiment this year, having an extra garden elsewhere. My granddaughters helped to plant at our home, and I look forward to showing the two older ones the other bed when they come next week. It will take some extra work and time going there and back, but it’s an interesting experiment thus far.

Community garden bed behind this colourful one

The promise of growth happens in spring in creation and it can also happen in our lives when we dare to explore something new. I haven’t always been a writer, for publication, but I’ve always been a reader. My first career as a preschool teacher taught me things that I didn’t know that helped me when my children were young preschoolers. It’s still an age I enjoy, even if my energy is not all it used to be. Each new thing I’ve tried—retail, election work, learning to play musical instruments, storytelling, teaching, writing and editing—have brought with them lessons I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. New connections were forged and publication credits encouraging, but also humbling.

The down sides have been like the weeds, cropping up here and there, making me doubt myself and my abilities from time to time. I ask myself, Was I meant to do this? But it was always something I wanted to try, like learning to play guitar more than a year ago, and more recently, deciding to try playing bells in a bell choir. The learning was still sometimes quite hard and required greater concentration.

Storytelling at the Button Factory

I’m still learning and hope I always can continue to learn. It keeps life interesting. It’s not always something brand new, but a different area of something that already holds my interest, like natural gardening and ways to work with nature instead of against it. 

And so the weeds are there all the same, in the garden and in our lives. I just need to learn when to pull them out and examine the situation from a different perspective before jumping back in again.

Garden, if you wish, but learn to recognize the weeds.