Friday, May 02, 2008

Weeding and feeding

I'm nervous about saying anything definite. A lot of things I hold dear have been seriously questioned lately. Maybe that's why it's hard to write. I like to write with my passion - and it's hard to get any intense feelings about "maybes", and "I wonders".
So I've been very contemplative lately.
Crazy contemplative.
I've always thought my uncanny ability to see spiritual things in the absolutely ordinary was rather...goofball Christian, rather than anything especially good. But it helps me see things in a practical way, so it's good for me.

That's as close to an introduction / explanation as you're going to get, I suppose, before you read this. I'm not going to explain the spiritual connections, I'm going to leave that to you. Maybe your connections will be even better than mine.

Keep in mind, each of these things for me, had a distinct spiritual meaning if you just changed the words to spiritual ones.
Yeah, I just said that, and no, I didn't expect I to make sense.

What I learned while weeding my yard.

My lawn mower has yet to start this year. It's not for lack of yanking either. But in absence of an official cutting machine, and until I got that issue fixed, I thought it might be a handy thing to yank up some of the tallest clumps of weeds. As I did, I gained a lot to think about.

I learned, that though my yard is really really weedy (is that a word?) that sometimes, I would pull up huge bunches of weeds and find some amazingly alive and healthy grass underneath.

I learned that a lot of times it's not about how hard it is to get the weeds up, because sometimes the weeds just pop right up... it's the matter of how many weeds there are and how it seems like a losing battle - like there's no point in trying because you'll never have a weed free yard.

I learned that while some weeds just slide right out, there are some weeds that break off and leave a root, other weeds that are prickly and hurt if you try to even touch them.

I learned that in places where there was a lot of good healthy grass, and fewer weeds, it was harder to get the weeds out. Harder to spot the grass from the weed, and harder to pull out only the weed and no grass.

I learned that even while I painstakingly pulled weeds out of my yard, I knew I wasn't committed to the long haul. I was only going to get an overall betterment of my yard, and I'd work until I was satisfied enough, or bored. But perfection wasn't the goal, because perfection seems impossible.

I learned that sometimes, other peoples dogs have pooped in my yard, and under my weeds are other peoples mess. Yeah, experience stinks.

I learned that the biggest annoyance, the biggest hindrance to weeding my yard, has nothing to do with my yard. It's attached to me. It's called hair. As I leaned down to get weeds, unless I secured my hair then it was constantly falling and blocking my view, getting in my face. Which just means that I didn't prepare myself before going out to weed my yard, which means that dirt and weed stuff got all over me and my hair because it was always getting in the way.

I also learned that while I think "weed and feed" is a wonderful thing - I noticed something. It only killed some of the weeds. Not all. But at least the weeds death was pretty noticeable. The thing that couldn't be measured was the "feed" part. I couldn't tell one whit whether my yard was greener or grassier. The only noticeable aspect was whether my weeds had died or not.
And at the same time, I realized that having a weed free yard didn't mean my I had a yard of luscious grass. It just meant I had gotten rid of the weeds.

That's the only part I'm going to comment on.
So often I get caught up weeding my life that I lose sight of the fact that I need to be feeding and fertilizing my life as well. So often I pride myself on the weeds I don't have in my life, while God can see that, sure enough, there aren't many weeds left, but that left me with only bald dirt. Not much of a yard for God to be proud of.

Gives new meaning to "The grass is always greener on the other side."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

interesting thoughts...i like it.