I’ve been struggling. I don’t mind admitting it. Over the past couple of months, Covid-19 has affected us all – many of us have experienced similar feelings but each of us will have felt it uniquely. For me, both lines of work pretty much dried up and my partner and I had to take the painful decision to postpone our much-anticipated wedding until next year and, like so many, our honeymoon/summer holiday also looks unlikely. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been moving house.
I’ve gone through that well-documented process of grief. The sheer inability to believe that this is actually happening to me. How this whole year now looks entirely different to what I had expected it to be. The frustration. The acute feeling of loss. Sadness. Finally just having to come to terms with things, the phase of acceptance. All of this combined with the natural lack of groundedness as we uprooted from one home to the next. It took me until only very recently to get to the acceptance part of this process. I thought I had accepted things a month ago but the niggles kept rearing their ugly heads and I knew I was, deep down, still resisting.
The other day whilst trying to unpack another box and create some sort of homely space amongst the chaos, even motivation left my side.
I love gardening. So I escaped the packing and took refuge in my new garden. As I got stuck into some meditative pruning, it occurred to me that gardeners are always at one with nature. Why? One of the reasons is that we understand that nature is not to be rushed and we just have innate respect for that great law. We tune into the seasons, we work away but all the time we are observing, admiring and patiently waiting. Us gardeners expect, even relish the wait – the promise to come of new buds, full blooms and beautiful scents. It makes our devotion and hard work even sweeter when the transformation does finally occur.
Nature happens in its own sweet time – when it should – when the season is right and only then when the conditions are right. It happens when it happens! It never stops working and growing but it will not be rushed, it will not be forced. The point I’m making is that when I work in the garden, I readily accept that I am working alongside a force much greater than myself – I just do what I can do and the universe takes care of the rest.
So why do we find it so challenging to apply this knowledge to ourselves? We are willing to be patient in some circumstances but when it comes to us, we fight tooth and claw against ourselves. Are we not, after all, a piece of nature? We aren’t that different to plants except we just have some emotions thrown into the mix – we need food, water, some TLC, the right conditions to thrive and time to unfold.
I concluded that I should be treating myself a little more like how I treat my garden – accepting that we cannot control the bigger picture and that things will happen for us when the conditions are right. At the moment, with the pandemic going on, the conditions aren’t right for most of us. So surrender to that. Keep on nurturing and nourishing yourself as best you can and you will bloom in time.
I placed way too much expectation on how I thought this year would be for me. And with that only came frustration and disappointment. I now take great comfort in applying the gardeners’ faith of the Great Law of Nature to my own path in life; in that things will unfold for me in their own sweet time – and who am I to interfere with that?! The same applies to you.
Sending all positive and healing vibes to all of you reading this,
Natasha
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