I love weeding, love it.  I think I heard someone once say that they don’t believe people who claim to enjoy this task, but I think it is as different for everyone as different their personalities.  I do find weeding meditative, I love to clear space both in the garden bed and inside and even within my thoughts, which is why I write, after all.

The farmer is more of a busy bee.  He flits from task to task and gets things done in a circular way.  He weeds to get a result.  But I sit down and zone out.  I move straight down the row, and if the small children allow, I will get to the end and walk away feeling like I finished something, refreshed, accomplished.

The smell of the earth close by, the sounds of outside.  Maybe I love it so because it is a respite from the lovely loud noise of a busy home.   But I have been thinking about this, bringing forth metaphors while I find time this early, early spring to start clearing away the mess of winter’s entropy–what does the way I garden say about me?

The tasks that lead up to are my favorite.  I can spend hours weeding, but also transplanting seedlings, starting seeds.  What I don’t always love to do is harvest.  Washing and preparing veggies for market is great, and market is always fun.  But the real act of completion, the harvest itself, I shy away from.  The farmer is fast and efficient and so even though I help when I can and often for ourselves, I can not harvest for hours and hours without going a little batty.

But I want to change that.  I want to have something to harvest for myself this year. I am so good at the meditating, the planting, but always afraid of actually letting something come to fruition.  So busy with thinking, always thinking.

In praise of this habit, I will say that cultivating the inner workings of a mind is a good thing to do, that I find peace in my soul’s place in this world.

I just want to bring some of that light to bear above the ground.

This year, soon.

I want to do the more tedious (for me) work of harvesting.