It's September and Autumn is upon us. Harvest time, which is also seeding time. Seed keys are spinning among the falling leaves. Summer flowers are going to seed if we're wise enough to let them. And we can learn from that…we can learn how to let ourselves go to seed in the appropriate season. For how will we be fruitful in the year to come if we do not seed now?
Some of us are already feeling the changing of the season. Friends talk of wanting more sleep. The daylight hours are noticeably shorter. Fruit is ripening and some of it is falling uneaten to the ground.
And I have been hacking back the brambles.
Let me clear here: hacking back, not pruning. There is nothing judicious or gentle about a bramble-hack. Foolish enough to wear a white top, I came away blood-and-blackberry stained. Scratched. Prodded. The thing about hacking brambles is that they hack right back at you. These are mean plants. Or true survivors, depending on how you want to look at it.
My lot have been cut back, dug out, blanket sprayed, root-killed and their response continues to be, like, yeah, whatever…! See you next year.
So I have stopped trying to kill them, and am settling for containment. I've decided how much of the garden they can have and will seek to get them to honour that agreement…by brute force once a year, and gentle persuasion for the rest of it. I am grateful for their flowers and the bees they sustained, and I am grateful for their fruit. And now, I reclaim some of that space and they can return next year.
This is all by way of meandering into thinking about mighty growth from tiny seeds. Key to ash, acorn to oak, blackberry to bramble overgrowth, thistledown to mighty purple-crowns. Late summer and early autumn are times to look to the seeds. See them meander over the meadows and roam across the rivers, whispering on the winds. Drifts of soft potentiality.
My unkempt patch at the back throws up different flowers and greenery each year, depending on what got planted between me and the birds, and what managed to take hold, and how the weather played, and (presumably) on what I cut and where I didn't, and (perhaps) on what birds and animals and insects wandered through and ate or didn't, pollinated or failed to. All I can be sure of is that something will grow green and may flower, or may simply ripen. There have been a few ears of wheat this year, among the grasses. Not enough to be useful, but certainly enough to make a lazy gardener smile. I still unearth the occasional potato. The herb garden is taking hold, but I have no idea what will survive the winter. Or what I should be planting for the spring. I am not only a lazy gardener. I am an ignorant one.
The grape hyacinth seem intent on having a second season. The columbine is responding to attempts to uproot it. And of course the fuchsia simply says 'thank you' when you hack it back to the ground and rewards with dripping buds of glory. We'll see how all of that fares as we head into the fullness of autumn.
So the thing is: how does all this relate to our internal garden?
There is a school of thought that says we should remember the acorn and the mighty oak. That we should put our acorn of ambition in the ground and tend it well. Water it. Fence the sapling against the things that might come to nibble it, or scratch its tender half-formed trunk. Watch it grow. Weed back around it, be sure it has light enough and that nothing takes too much of the soil's nutrient that our tender little oakling needs. Prune as necessary to ensure even growth.
It is a school of thought.
And if you are fixed in your ambition, then please follow these ideas. Plant your acorn and protect and nurture it…grow to become the mighty oak of your imagining. Allow that the 'oak' may not be the best image for your ambition, perhaps you are willow, or ivy, or seagrass, or bramble, or daisy. That matters not. If you have a firm intention, plant it and tend it, and know that however small you start, how tall or wide you grow, how long-lived your success, will not be limited by that smallness of beginning.
However…what if you're feeling down-hearted because you're rummaging in your internal garden, scuffing your old plimsolls in the dirt and not finding so much as a single acorn? Not one solitary wizened ash key? Not even an old apple pip?
Fret not. Because there is another school of thought. This one says that we should keep a space in our internal garden that is deliberately unkempt.
If we are living our lives, getting on with the daily stuff, if the bills are paid (eventually), and there is food on the table, and friends or family who call or write or show up (now and then), if we indulge our whims occasionally , be that to draw or write or take photographs or bake cakes or sew quilts or dig holes or swim in the sea or walk down unmarked lanes, if we get up in the morning and get through another day and have a bed to sleep in come the night, then you know what? We're doing ok.
Don't let other people tell you that you could be / should be doing anything different. If you're getting by, then that's a great start.
Ah, but it's not enough, I hear you tentatively whisper (or scream in frustration). And I agree. I would never settle for 'getting by' either.
Only I did. I planted acorns and tended them and watched them grow. I denied I was ambitious, all the while growing my oak. It was only afterwards that I understood that they were not MY acorns. Not my ambitions. I thrive on achievement, so it took me a long time to realise that there is 'achievement' and there is, in that clumsy phrase of Maslow's, 'self -actualisation'. They are not the same thing. So motivated by achieving, I kept on doing so.
And I kept writing in my journal I do not want to be here.
Any coach will tell you that most of their clients are more clear about what they don't want, than they are about what they actually do want. This is why I believe we need an unkempt plot in our internal garden. We need a space that we don't tend very well.
My real-world back plot gets cut back. It sometimes gets weeded. The trees that would take it over get deliberately restrained. But mostly, it is left to its own devices. It is messy. Untidy. I chuck unwanted bulbs in sometimes. The birds kick seeds off the table. Whatever passes through no doubt leaves its own contribution to the nutrients. And it never fails to surprise me during the spring and the summer flowering seasons, and more things are fruiting this year. I have pears. Tiny apples.
The joys of this plot lie in that it gives unconditionally. Just because it wants to. Maybe because I am not telling it what I want it to give me.
So learning from that, I keep this space in my mind, in my spirit, my soul, this unkempt space, this untidy space, the overgrown, not-well-enough-weeded, self-seeded space, that is allowed to do its own thing.
I go there in spare moments. Early in the morning. Late at night. In those unslept hours of full-moons. While waiting for trains in the afternoon. I go into my untended inner space, to see what has been growing while I haven't been looking.
And yes, I find over-thinking undergrowth that needs to be uprooted. But I also find flowers and fruits. I find colour and sheen and possibility. I find beauty. I find nourishment. I find potential. I find things that I did not consciously choose, but seem to want to grow in me anyway, if I will just look away and let them be.
The thing is this: we might think we don't know what we need; we might think that we don't know what we want; we might think we don't know what our true ambitions are. The truth is that our minds might not know these things, but our souls do. We just need to get out of their way sometimes.
If you have dear-held ambitions then certainly tend the plots where you have planted them. Do the work to see them through. But whether you have one of those plots or not, I urge you to leave a bit of wild space, a 'reserve' if you will, where you can just stand back and see what grows all of its own accord.
I recommend that you do this in your garden and in your soul.
