Foundational Planting

Working in the garden not only helps to practice living an intentional lifestyle, but the garden itself is a microcosm of intentional living. The soil is our minds, the plants are our beliefs about the world, and our gardening work is our actions we take in the 3D reality related to those beliefs.

My garden is quite large, and in order to manage it, I break it into smaller garden beds. With having ignored it an entire year, I’ve had to break it into even smaller zones within each bed, so I don’t get overwhelmed.

I finished up my smallest bed by the mailbox and moved onto the next one. I could have picked one of several, but I decided on the rose garden. It is just outside my front door and I see it every day. That was my reasoning, I want to see something beautiful each time I go out the front door, not just show beauty to the neighbors. This is called the rose garden because it had two rose bushes in it, a traditional English and a knockout. In its center, it had a cypress tree that died during this winter.

Like the tree in my garden bed, beliefs sometimes die. Occasionally, they are foundational beliefs, just as this cedar was the foundational planting on this part of the garden. Ironically, over the past year, along with the foundational planting death of the cypress, I had a foundational belief of mine shattered.  I always assumed The Observer, that part of my brain that watches and comments on what is happening to me without emotion attached to it, was always right. Because it had no emotion, I thought it had to be right. It wasn’t clouded by feelings. It came to my attention, however, that The Observer could be wrong.

That rocked my world.

Just as I had to take a new look at all the plants in the rose garden once the cypress was cut down and removed, so I had to reconsider all the decisions I had made based on The Observer’s observations about my life. After cutting down and removing the cypress, I looked at the remaining plants in the bed. Some of them did not work in the aesthetic any longer without the anchor of the cypress.  One was the knockout rose.

Like a thought derived from another thought, it looked differently when viewed on its own. It was too big, too bushy and too far off to one side. So one night after work, I pruned it back and dug it up, transplanting it to another spot in my shade garden. Like assumptions I had made based on The Observer’s calculations, I had to reevaluate many of my own thoughts. If x could not be true, then why am I acting out y? Like the cypress tree, does that thought no longer have a place in my mind and must be removed? Or is it like the knockout rose, where the thought must be tweaked and moved around in order to serve me better?

Gardening is a great place to do thought work, where we examine our thoughts and see if they are worth thinking. Our thoughts lead to our feelings and our feelings lead to our actions. I think, “I want a beautiful garden.” This is a good thought that brings me joy.  But my garden isn’t beautiful. It’s in a shambles because I ignored it for an entire year. This leaves me feeling dissatisfied with the state of my garden. Which then urges me to feel motivated to work on the garden. I then take the action of actually working on the garden.

While I raked, weeded, planted, and mulched, I not only cleared away debris in my yard, but in my mind as well. I pulled up extra sedum plants and bearded irises, which had become overgrown. I moved a cauldron I had been gifted to the bed to use as a planter. I planted astilbe and cornflower in the soft earth. I examined thoughts of The Observer’s in a new light, questioning some, accepting others, always with the raw, open space of “The Observer could be wrong.”

My rose garden, which now only has one rose, looks lovely. It is clean and neat, well-groomed and taken care of.  There are plants planted which compliment each other. If they do not, I’ll move them or dig them up, give them away or sell them locally. Like my thoughts, I will nourish what I want to grow and weed out what no longer serves me. Even if the foundational planting has to come out.