Tag Archives: Overwhelm

Humble

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Red rain barrel in front of house, heat pump seen on upper right, behind oregano plants all over the place, green with white flowers
Overgrown oregano all around the rain barrels and heat pump.

I love sharing photos of beauty in the yard. But it is harder to know how to share the challenges and failures. I actually feel like a failed gardener right now. Yes, there are little harvests, yes there are elements of beauty. But there is so much that is overwhelming. I don’t enjoy “weeding” which seems to be what real gardeners often talk about enjoying. A weed is merely a wrong plant in the wrong place. We make further distinctions to talk about invasive plants that are harmful to the local ecosystem. And there are also native plants that are aggressive in the ecosystem.

One of my overwhelming senses of failure comes from the oregano that is spreading all over the orchard. When I originally planted some donated oregano as a companion plant to the orchard trees, I had no idea how it would take over. Oregano is a tasty herb, not native, but useful, and the bees love the flowers; I’ve dried some of the plant for seasoning. Last year as it spread, I thought, okay, just let it go where it wants. This year I tried taking out a tiny patch using a garden fork. Its roots form a thick mat under the soil. Even a tiny patch was challenging to remove. I’ve lately taken the mower through the orchard a few times. With the rain and heat inhibiting our outdoor time this summer, I can’t imagine how to get it under control. I hate the feeling of needing to get a plant under control.

Everything in the yard is ragged and overwhelming. For each native plant I newly discover and appreciate (like the evening primrose that the goldfinches adore), there is another tall unknown plant that I have no idea about. The orchard trees have to be pruned each year, and face challenges from mysterious pests and diseases. Will the Lapins cherry survive its challenges?

Perhaps in all of this, I discover that I don’t enjoy tending and caring for this patch of earth the way I thought I would? I am not good at gardening? I’ll never be good at harvesting much food? I want to give up sometimes, but how can I? Everything is right outside my door. I acknowledge that it is much more difficult for all gardeners because of the climate catastrophe of our times. I realize that I don’t have teachers to show me how–mostly just books really, and the internet. I don’t think gardening was meant to be so all alone.

But I have made this commitment to a spiritual journey into earth community. These overwhelming challenges are part of that journey too. So what can I do? This morning, I took myself out to our new screen tent, placed a blanket on the ground, and sat on the ground. It has been a while since I have done that. At our old yard, I used to sit on the ground in a screen tent almost every day. Lately, instead, I have been walking around looking at things that need tending. Today, I sat on the ground and let the ground tend to me. I turned to each of the four directions, to honor the powers of east, south, west, and north–and the powers of the earth below, the sky above, the spirit within.

The sun shining through in the eastern sky, from within the screen tent.

It reminds me that I am small, and these powers are large. Spirit is large. They are my teachers and carers. I hear the cardinal singing from the tall trees. Truthfully, I am not really the one who tends the earth, the earth is the one who tends to me.

I am remembering a chant song I learned from a friend in English, and then heard later in Wolastoqey; As far as I can discern, it originated from Wolastoq people, and has since been performed by other indigenous people as well. My friends and I sang it something like this, in several verses substituting the word “creator” with all manner of beings, such as trees, ancestors, water, stars, dragonflies, children–all the creatures around us.

We've got to humble ourselves in the eyes of the creator, we've got to bend down low.
We've got to humble ourselves in the eyes of the creator, we've got to know what they know.
We can raise each other up, higher and higher. We can raise each other up.

Perhaps the failures are also teachers, a reminder of our ultimate dependence, an opening into something more mysterious and powerful in whose eyes we are seen and held.

Weather Report

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Close-up of white woman smiling into camera, with blue sun hat, sun glasses, and backdrop of ocean beach, with small figure looking out to sea.
Crescent Beach, Myke, with Margy in background.

A week ago we finally made it to the beach. We’ve had so many rainy days this summer, alternating with a few very hot muggy days. That day was hot and muggy, but less so at Crescent Beach, so we got ourselves over there. The water was totally full of seaweed, and somehow that dampened my enthusiasm for swimming, but the wading was lovely, and lying on a blanket in the sand. I’m smiling in the selfie, but this post is more about the challenges of this summer.

It feels like a summer in which it is very hard to love the earth, or to feel loved by the earth. It is hard to even go outside! According to the weather report for Maine, June had only 7 days without rain. And July the rainy patterns have continued. But what makes it worse is that the days without rain have gone to the opposite extreme of muggy and hot. I don’t think we’ve had even one dry, sunny, moderately warm day. The other challenge has been air quality–many days of smoke particles making their way from Canada–not to an extreme, but enough to bump the meter from “good” to “moderate”.

And I have to acknowledge that we’ve been lucky here. No flash flooding of town centers, like in Vermont this week. No over-100-degree heat for days on end like in Arizona. No forest fires on our doorstep. But still…

I’ve been feeling like a failure in my deep intention to build relationship with the earth. It’s not that the garden is doing so badly (except for maybe the cherry tree). It is just that I feel unable to tend to it, unable to even sit outside and appreciate it. (The cherry tree needs some attention because of, perhaps, black cherry aphids and sooty mold.) If I manage to do one small garden thing in a day, I count that as gain. For example, the other day, I put some tulle netting over the ripening blueberry plants.

Tulle fabric spread over blueberry bush, with raindrops, berries starting to ripen.

I do try to walk around for ten minutes in the morning if I can. But none of it feels like the nurture that the garden had been for me during the last several years. Instead I feel a vague sense of overwhelm, I feel uncomfortable in my body, I feel grief and deep weariness.

And the truth is, because of climate change, because of the destructiveness of our larger society, we are all facing unimaginable loss, we are all facing a time of unknowable earth transformation that may lead to our doom. With this looming around us, no wonder these small weather challenges feel so overwhelming.

So today I am making space for that overwhelm, for grief, for rest. But even in the midst of those feelings, there are parts of the garden that still seemed determined to bring beauty to my eyes. I look out the front window, and the roadside garden is now awash in yellow heliopsis flowers and day lilies. They brighten even a gray day.

Yellow heliopsis flowers all over the roadside garden.