The Gift of Perspective

Yesterday was a big day around here, when decades of record-taking show it's safe to plant tomatoes and other garden fare without losing them to frost. It was a graduation of sorts, releasing the little seedlings I'd cared for the last several weeks into the big world. I should have been excited.

Instead, as with a lot of things in my life lately, I was frustrated and overwhelmed. My job while Jeff hauled bag after bag of soil amendment (that's a nice euphemism, by the way) and tilled the garden plot was to plan out where we wanted what. I hardly could do it.

I got hung up on the villain vinca groundcover encroaching all around the garden boxes we've carved out of our jungle in the back. Trying to dig them out was just too much. I gave up in disgust.

"Why are you making this so hard?" Jeff wondered, still focused on the task at hand: planting our garden, not waging war with the vinca. 

Why indeed? Why was gardening yet another listed passenger on my flight from joy to burden?

In this area of my life, as in others -- child-rearing, housecleaning and more -- I think I falter because I've been trying too hard, wanting the outcome without savoring the process. I can home in on flaws no one else even notices.

Today when we walked home from church Elise pointed out the beautiful allium flowers in a neighbor's gorgeous yard. Hundreds of purple blossoms explode into a fireworks shape atop each giant stalk. When Elise said, "Look, Mom! It's like a purple dandelion," I smiled that she ranked this gem next to a seedy weed. You know, she's right. 

What follows is an essay I wrote for the blog Backyard Farming at this same time last year. Go figure. I'm sharing it because it's a lesson I obviously still need to learn and apply to my garden, family and life.  Because really, vinca's flowers are my favorite shade of periwinkle.

The Gift of Perspective

Through a child's eyes, everything is beautiful and worth sharing.

Taking part in a recent neighborhood cleanup, a group of us remarked that from a distance the flowerbeds we were asked to weed looked pretty good.  Only when we got up close did we notice all the fallen twigs beneath the bulb foliage, the smothering layer of matted leaves no perennial could burst through, the singularly stubborn blades of errant grass. 

The devil’s in the details, so the saying goes.  Suddenly there was a lot of work.

But it was a beautiful morning, and as I walked home afterwards I considered the time well spent.  I rounded the corner to my street.  As I got closer to home my eyes played tricks on me.  The farsightedly homogenous patches of green in my yard shifted into distinct forms, and – oh, no! – there were lots of WEEDS!

I walked around my yard, front and back, my eyes simply the window office for a furious little taskmaster list-maker in my head.  Oh, just look at all that has to be done! I lamented. Dandelions, bindweed and clover, oh my! I’ll never catch up.

What had happened? Naturally, bionic or not, the weeds had been there before I left that morning.  Why, all of a sudden, were the details so distressing to me?

I worked through the afternoon, hardly making a dent, I thought. The next day I sauntered into the shady backyard.  It was a day of rest.  Besides, the dress I was wearing almost kind of sort of stopped any chance of my picking up a shovel.  I sat on my lawn just to enjoy the blue birds and yellow-striped finches flitting from crabapple blossom to pine tree branch.  I leaned back, dismissed the weeds I saw and instead counted how many new raspberry starts have emerged.

You know, details.

Wait. Marvelous, glorious details.

Thoroughly refreshed, I had an epiphany of sorts.  I love working in my garden because of the progression. Further, being on the gardening frontlines gives me an unparalleled view of nature.  It is when I’m tending to the undesirable aspects of gardening, like weeding, that I tend to notice the grandeur of the small stuff.

It would be a shame if I ever finished my gardening chores.