Protect Your Tender Shoots

Imagine, if you will, the perfect smorgasbord — salads and delectable herbs spread before you on a sunny afternoon in May.  The day is right for an early summer picnic.  Perhaps a glass of wine or sparklingly clear water.  The sound of birds above your head, the sun warming the stone walls and walks and grass beneath you.

Now imagine that you are a rabbit, and the naïve homeowners have just returned from the garden center with flats of lettuces and tomatoes and basil and kale and Swiss chard they intend to plant over the holiday weekend – their summer garden.

I’ll dispense with the gory details.  The morning after we’d set out fresh, full flats to get some sunshine until we planted them, was not a pretty scene.

Naked parsley stalks poked skyward.  A few ragged Swiss chard leaves remained in the plastic cubicles.  The green leaf lettuce looked like it had been strafed.  Only the tomatoes had withstood the attack of our resident cottontail army.

Sigh.

Instead of regret, though, when I stepped out the other morning to water them, I saw in those lettuces a bit of myself after a hard few months of interpersonal and organizational stress.  I saw in the baby veggies a most teachable moment for the soul.

Haven’t you, too, experienced seasons when no matter how hard you try to nurture a friendship, to show up, help a friend or family member as best you can carry a burden, or some flailing organization you care about to steer a steadying course – it’s as if you don’t exist.  Or, if you do exist, you are merely tolerated, drawn into uncharted (and unspoken) agendas, chipped away at by petty conflict and resentments – the higher values somehow fog-bound in eddies of pain?

My world generally has been in a bad mood this spring – through no one’s fault.  Just life happening:  illnesses, sadness, stuckness.  Good people in dark passes, making it up as we go.   My world has also absorbed the contagious toxicity of the larger culture (how could it not?) – of obsessive competition, self-regard, defensive resentments, full-on conflict mode, whether overt or covert.

In case you don’t already know this, it can happen among “good spiritual folks” as readily as anyone else.

I looked at the shorn parsley that morning and I did what any reasonable gardener would do – I removed them from the line of attack, set them up on a porch, watered and talked gently to them, then I left them alone for a few days to just rest.

This wasn’t a giving up, but a resuscitation.  There are times when trying too hard and getting few results is just too draining to sustain.

It’s okay to step away.  Really.

I have a friend who annually bucks the high tide of Memorial Weekend socializing, barbecues, and beers. She packs her things and heads to the mountains with a good book until quiet returns to the neighborhood.  Not a bad option when one feels a bit chewed up.

The parsley will return.  Nerves and unsettled feelings will settle.  June will come.

I wish you peace, and a few new leaves.

Kathleen