Lifestyle

Learn to live imperfectly through our garden


Learn to live imperfectly through our garden

There was a time when I valued everything in its rightful place. There was a time when I believed that my value in work, my creativity, my income, my career all came first. I have been successful in this. I am a lifestyle blogger. One needed to show a finished room with everything in its rightful place. I need to wear the right clothes and do something worth following… worth liking… getting engaged. I won’t lie that most of my 20s have been spent thinking this. I place personal value on these things.

Everything changed when I had our son. My body is no longer mine. I can’t control that. I couldn’t control how my body worked after giving birth. Everything is going slow. My house is harder to keep clean. I was tired. I got lost in it for a while. But then a new journey began as we left city life and headed for the countryside north of Michigan. I started writing a new story about what feeling self worth looks like.

I came here looking for a background, an identity that I knew for myself and no one else said what it was, and somewhere along the shores of Lake Michigan with a baby often wrapped around my chest, I found the place. to begin this imperfect journey. in my life.

Woman in the harvest garden

I haven’t written here honestly in a long time, but honestly having another baby right before a pandemic makes it hard for me to hear myself clearly. But I feel the time has come because this summer I have learned, expanded, slowed, and even more that has opened up within me to hear myself. The expectations have gone out, leaving no room for myself to hang around in my head. In our community, we’re learning how to live and enjoy the pinnacle of the moment this month, and I’ve had a lot of thought reading this over the past few months to prepare to guide my community through this.

So I wanted to sit here and write, share a podcast, give some thoughts on this.

You see last year when we expanded the garden and planted it all, that was the first year I felt my gardening skills had become an important part of my career. I fear this in a way because I don’t want it to rob me of the fun. The point is that I’ve been gardening in some way all my life. I grew up in my grandfather’s garden in Harbor Springs. I lived in northern Michigan, where the food and the seasons were one and the same. I was always fascinated with things that were developing even in college as an athlete. I found these. But as our garden was growing and I was planning a pandemic with a newborn baby, I felt this immense pressure to know everything, to be knowledgeable, to not fail. .

Brene Brown - The Gift of Imperfect Quotes

This feeling carried me through last year’s growing season. Then this winter I took the time to rewrite this story in my head. I realized that my garden has nothing to do with being perfect. I fail and learn. Nature has its own ways and things don’t work for crazy reasons, especially when you grow yourself with nature and without the control of chemicals, organic or natural or not. Either way, she has her rhythm.

As I’ve gone through this development season, I’ve had a lot of setbacks. The sacks. My Thai basil never took. My tulsi never made but did from seed. I don’t know how to use Shiso. I decided that corn wasn’t worth it. I have some weird spots on a tomato. Chickens still have lice. My morning glories will not be great. My melons are stunted. Soil still really sucks in certain places. But I’ve also had these big wins… Tomatoes are the tastiest fruit we’ve ever grown. The flowers and perennials are thriving. Our grapes are bigger than ever. The list goes on and on. We have completed a chicken coop. “Success” is timeless, but this year I also added other things I never dreamed of: garden successes like letting the weeds prove they are wildflowers. And my weeding laziness proved to be a reliable way into the garden. Or milkweed growing in clumps of strawberries and beans or amaranth seedlings and larger than any other that I’ve grown and seeded for transplant in February.

You see, as I approach this growing season, I have to look at things in a new way. I love what I do and that I can inspire all of you to start gardening, live more connected with nature and find a deeper connection with yourself through that connection whether from eating locally and/or from your garden… .but the point is that the worst thing is to believe that in the process there is some degree of success or failure. In a way, your garden should literally and figuratively fit in a box. In fact, the more I learn from observing and observing my garden, and deepening my connection with it in a more intuitive way that gardening doesn’t have much to do with pests gnawing the fields. your lake or the abundance of your harvest. Instead, it has everything to bring a spirit of play and learning to it. And to cultivate that we have to let go of control and perfect. As an adult, this is difficult. We have been trained to believe that we must perform, achieve, and more in order to be valuable or to survive, but the garden has shown me that is far from the truth. It is part of it, but not the whole picture. Instead, as one of you told me in the DM. If something isn’t gnawing your garden, you’re not feeding the ecosystem. Everything has a place in our garden, even the Pumpkin Bugs. I’ve learned everything has its time and place and my job is simply here to be trending but not perfect. But just give it all the time it needs. The more I do this and the more I let go of expectations of being done, doing the “right” things… .v., the more I give myself a deeper sense of grace and being able to see things as imperfect. The perfection of life is the most beautiful place for light to shine through.

I think this comes with age. I really do, but I think the garden is a place where we can learn this and live with it. We can safely go through the process of accepting our imperfections without waiting for someone to disapprove of us because we didn’t do something well. It is in our court how we feel when the tomatoes rot all the flowers and no one else’s. We can face any challenge be it a moment of learning or a “failure”. I stopped seeing them this. I have done the same in myself. When things aren’t going the way I like them or I feel like my “expectations” are going up, I back off. I re-evaluate. I listen to myself. I asked where care needs to be taken if at all… after all, sometimes taking care of yourself involves nothing more than rest. There is much to hear in ourselves and in our gardens.

Woman in the garden in summer

This summer as I watched the garden come to fruition, I witnessed a lot of things go against the perfectly crafted winter/January/February plan. I should probably just let myself play in the winter but I want to know that I won’t stick to the plan anymore ha. Mostly I needed a place to practice my passion, but like we said… our best plans are simply plans. Every year I put the tree on the ground and look and forget the road map and just feel it. Then this year I let nature play with me. This is 100% an act of sloppiness this year and there’s nothing nicer to see. The way nature and I communicated through trust and reciprocity was like writing a love song I didn’t know I needed to hear or feel in my life.

The problem is that if I carry the expectation that everything needs to be the way it is, or the rows have to be perfect, the flowers are only in one place, or the things are constantly being completely weeded, I’m missing something. hard to believe this year. There is a joy that I never get from this garden and it is the surprise, the lack of planning, the lack of clean goods, or meeting some degree of expectation that has allowed me to learn about and see nature. do his job. By accepting imperfection, I have allowed a natural environment that only nature itself can plan.

So I want you to hear me when I say that if you grow your own garden nature will never be perfect and we should take note of this about ourselves too. We should note why we want it to be perfect. Why do we want to get rid of all the bugs from our cucumbers or make sure that the yellow leaves are always removed… .maybe they are like wrinkles on our skin; represents our age and time in this life. The more I grow up with nature and less with anything else, the more I realize that our greatest harvest has nothing to do with the harvest basket but with everything to do with hearts, minds and our souls. Sure I grow because I love the plants, the food, and the taste of the upright things of the vine, but I grow so much more for the healing that I feel barefoot between the beds.

If you are growing a home garden, there will be bites on your kale leaves, there will be occasional caterpillars, there will be a squash beetle, there will be failed squash plants. Over time though we will see that this is how nature works and we will find that when these moments happen to us they have nothing to do with failure or not being enough, rather they are simply an opportunity for us to become more whole, to contribute more to the world, and to validate who we are.

Calendula, borage and Queen's Ann's Lace growing in the garden

It’s been an ongoing journey, but this year as I’m filling my harvest basket or in the garden, I’m watching her speak a new language to me and in turn, it brings a new conversation. new in me. I deserve the same care I give her and even more. I deserve this life and joy. I am deeply valuable just because I am here in this moment. That’s what I learned from her through networking and chatting this summer. It was a new level of wildness in myself that my 20-year-old self would never have let me feel, but one that I knew she wanted.

This summer, we talked a lot about this in our community and participate in it through Weekly Meditation on Podcast if you want to listen. Our community has specific events to address this as well as Weekly Journal reminders to add deeper meaning and intention to our months in the garden and through the seasons. We hope you will join us in the Fall and/or Winter.





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