As I was pulling so many thistles that were taking over my yard, I began thinking how quickly neglect can produce so many weeds. Neglecting and under estimating how stubborn negatives in our lives can be has the power to cause us great difficulty. Things that hurt us or bother us, don’t just go away. They go underground and spread through our psyche. Nothing that happens to us disappears. We are the product of all our experiences. How we navigate through them and how we utilize them matters. I was thinking that life problems can be like these thistles. Things happen to us and if we don’t deal with them in good time or we think it’s not that bad and we put off and action we need to take, the thistles will fill the begin to fill the void and spread all over the yard (i.e. our being). I read that thistles and weeds in general fill voids. It is necessary to plant healthy counter plants in areas to crowd out weeds so they can’t grow. Perhaps that is what our positive actions on behalf of ourselves also does to crowd out what isn’t healthy for us.
Negativity can begin to take over our thinking patterns and our emotions. We get discouraged that we will never be able to manage all of this. We can become closed to options and solutions and become so drained that we don’t have the energy to tackle what is causing us pain. We aren’t always aware of what is making us so tired and also don’t necessarily understand the depth of our negative experiences and in frustration we shrug them off and tell ourselves we are okay and not much can be done. It’s over and done with we say, but this doesn’t help us.
If these negative experiences take hold of our deepest thoughts, they can proliferate and over time become over whelming. So over whelming that we don’t know where to start. We have provided the conditions in which these weeds can grow and these negative weeds develop deep roots and are hard to pull out.
I learned from avid gardeners that tending to a yard or a gardens seems to work on a little at time and often basis. If we develop a way to deal with breaking things into smaller pieces and parts and keep doing this on regular basis, we can get our negative thoughts or weeds under some kind of manageable control. Eventually we will have better outcomes and enjoy a beautiful healthy yard or garden to reflect on.
Solving our difficulties requires managing the small pieces rather than getting over whelmed and frustrated with the big picture. Sometimes we can feel hopeless that we will never get over or solve something troubling our lives. But if we pick a small area and work on it and then pick another small area another time and work on that, eventually we will accumulate pieces and will have covered more of the yard or garden (i.e. our being) with our efforts than we could have imagined and we won’t be too exhausted to continue. I think we can manage our lives this way to work through something difficult and painful. We can find different ways of being to enhance our lives. So I have vowed to take one area at a time and see what I can build.
GARDEN THE WEEDS 