Folks are always commenting about our lovely landscaping and I like to joke that we have nothing to do with it because the previous owner was a landscape designer.  We do have to maintain it, which was not a problem. Until now.

After several days of rain and hot weather, the weeds multiplied by the thousands. Our beds are covered in green, and not the pretty kind. This situation is particularly frustrating because just a few months ago, my husband weeded and sprayed every bed before laying down mulch.  But now those gorgeous beds are being choked by massive weeds.

My morning run did little to clear my head so with time to spare, I decided to tackle the weeds with the “Fly Lady” approach –tackle the yard in 15 min increment because when I look around the yard, I get completely overwhelmed by the number of weeds.  Good god, maybe we should have stayed in our town house, beautiful yard be damned!

Just so you know, yard work does not come naturally.  As a child, my brother and I weeded as part of our summer chores.  How I hated it!  I wanted to play or go to the pool, not weed the yard.  So here I am many years later with a shovel and a yard full of weeds.  Fifteen minutes, I only need to do this for 15 minutes, I kept saying before I began.

I grabbed the shovel and went to work.  Hmmm… when was the last time I had my hands in the dirt?  The soil, rich and earthy smelling, had worms, lady bugs, mysterious seeds and rocks, scattered here and there. Some weeds were definitely harder to pull than others and I had to dig deeper or make my hole wider to get at the roots.  Other weeds were so pretty with delicate flowers making me question if they were really weeds.

I continued to dig and pull, finding myself in a bit of a meditative state and the fifteen minutes passed quickly.  After another five minutes, I had to put my shovel down and start my day.  That afternoon, while the boys played outside, I found myself at another bed and one hour later, I felt such a sense of accomplishment when I saw that I had cleared out an entire bed of weeds. 

This approach continued throughout the weekend and I’m happy to report that we only have one bed left to weed, which I hope to attack one early morning this week.

I surprised myself and found the whole process therapeutic and so unlike my experience as a teenager.  I was brought back to the earth, pulling weeds, one at a time as I cleared out space in each bed.  What satisfaction I felt when I walked past a weeded bed – “I did that,” I thought. “Look how nice it looks.”  

As I was digging in the dirt, I thought about how weeding is a metaphor for life –  how something so overwhelming and BIG and scary can be tackled just one task (or weed) at a time in small increments.   With some problems you have to work harder to remove them from your life and dig a little deeper, other times it is easier to make a change.  But easy or hard, you need to tackle whatever you are facing -one thing at a time.  You can’t clear a bed unless you pull each weed out.

And what about those “weeds” in our lives – those negative thoughts, patterns or behaviors which no longer serve us and cause us harm?  How often have I held onto an old way of being because it was comfortable and the way I always reacted to a situation?  What would happen if I cleared some space in my life for new things to blossom?  What if one by one, I pulled out the negative patterns and made room for new behaviors?

I have a tendency to want to change everything at once, and I know I’m not alone in that.  How many of us have pledged that we’ll exercise every day while starting a diet, consuming only certain foods in an attempt to lose weight? And how many of us are successful when we try to do everything at once? 

What I was reminded of in the garden was that that my hands will get dirty and I may have to dig deeper to remove something that is stuck, but if I take it one step at a time, I can confront the problems facing me.  New ones will certainly crop up, just like new weeds will grow in my garden, but a few minutes of work every day can keep my garden cleared of weeds and my mind clear.

Just like my garden, I am a work in progress.