The chaos amongst me is but the confusion within me. The more neglected my yard, the more out of balance my inner ecology seems to be.
I don’t super love a perfectly manicured landscape as I appreciate the wild wisdom that grows outside the lines of control. Nature is messy, brilliantly adaptive and it is smart and purposeful in its ordering of systems despite the conditioned perception of a colonized mind.
However, every now and again I do thin out the congestion and intertwining to optimize water usage, create wide open spaces, plant more pollinators, and even to conform a little to the standards of the over-culture. Truth-be-told there is also something particularly cathartic about weeding.
This last quest to re-root, re-align, and restore myself resulted in the prodding of stubborn thistles clenched deep in the ground like an anchor centering itself against the spin of the earth. I leveraged. I pulled. I heaved. I even hoed. With each attempt to remove its clutch, I grew more and more aware of the stubborn and strong-willed parts of me that were also refusing to let go of a foundation that can no longer support me.
Sometimes we root where we weren’t supposed to be planted. Sometimes we can’t meet our optimal potential in certain environments. Perhaps that’s an advantage to being human, we can choose where we want to belong. We have agency (at least some) in how and where we want to grow. Perhaps this is why eons ago we became nomadic…to explore our capacity of re-earthing. To trust our inherent ability to rebuild, reproduce, recreate in a globe of diverse terra-experiential embodiment. How incredible it is to have many landscapes to bloom from!
After removing a half-dozen of weeds from the clay ground, my inner confusion began to settle. The hands of my soul untangled the knotting rhizomes of my mind and my worries turned to answers, my dis-ease turned to harmony, and the process of life best suited for me was revealed.
