Karmic muffins

Periodically, I give baked goods or other foody gifts to our neighbors. It just seems like a nice thing to do, particularly since we ask them to take in our mail or watch the house while we are away. Last summer, for example, I made tons of blueberry muffins and gave them to all of our (close) neighbors. Yesterday, our neighbor across the street came by with her son to bring us homemade banana muffins (with vanilla frosting and colored sugar, no less!). The bible says “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days” -- a way of saying that good deeds will bring you benefit. Well, I guess I cast my muffins on the waters, and they were returned with frosting!

We ate the karmic muffins, and they were delicious.

Lessons from the garden: Weeding, pruning, and thinning

When I first began gardening, I thought mostly about adding to the garden (that is, putting in plants), but a big part of gardening involves subtracting from the garden through weeding, pruning and thinning. These are still the tasks I have trouble with, but they are important components in all aspects of life.

• Weeding: Weeding is about eliminating unwanted volunteer plants. Weeds are constantly cropping up, and they have a tendency to crowd out the desirable plants, leaching away water and nutrients and creating a messy look to the garden. So we pull them up. The lesson here is to be vigilant in looking for weeds in our own lives. Are there projects or commitments or activities or habits that you don't want, that are stealing energy and time from your goals and priorities? If so, it may be time to uproot and eliminate those unwanted aspects of your life. But remember that something may seem like a weed to one person, but not to another. I am determined to uproot every pokeweed plant in my garden, but I have a friend who loves to watch the birds feast on its berries. To me it is a weed, but not to her. Just because something may seem like a waste of time to others, doesn't mean you must eliminate it -- you are the only one who can determine whether it is unwanted in your life. And sometimes, the unintentional plants are a delightful contribution to the garden -- I'm happy to see the petunias that re-seeded from last year's plants, even though I didn't intend for them to be there. Just because something is unplanned, doesn't mean that it is necessarily unwanted.
• Pruning: Even desirable plants need to be cut back from time to time. Not only do we cut away the dead wood, but we cut them back to make them smaller, to train them to a particular shape, to encourage more vigorous blooming. Pruning helps maintain healthy plants and keeps them from overgrowing the space. Yet I find it difficult to motivate myself to prune -- the holly gets bigger and bigger, but isn't that good? The rose brambles take over an entire corner of the garden, but how could that be bad? Yet now the holly is pressing against the house, and that spectacular rose now shades the lavender and coneflower. Even desirable parts of our lives can become too big and unwieldy and may begin to crowd out other goals. Sometimes we need to check the balance in our life, to make sure that some activities or commitments haven't exceeded the space we meant to allocate to them. I have always enjoyed baking, but at one point, I had so many people on my holiday cookie list that I ended up baking cookies for days on end. What had been enjoyable became a chore; I needed to scale back, to prune. Is there something in your life that has grown too big?
• Thinning: Every year, I put in vegetables from seed: carrots, kohlrabi, radishes. I sprinkle the seeds in the ground and am rewarded with rows of tiny seedlings. This is when I'm supposed to thin the plants -- to remove enough of the seedlings so that the remaining ones have space to grow. Every year, I resist thinning. How can I remove perfectly healthy plants and throw them on the compost heap? I pull a few and then give up, figuring the rest of them can fight it out. But by being unwilling to thin out the plants, I doom the whole lot of them to become thin and pallid, unable to develop fully. This really is the hardest lesson for me. I want to be able to do everything, to teach and research and sew and bead and dance and read and garden and cook and bake and write and take art classes and learn Arabic . . . but I can't do it all. If I try, I end up doing a little of everything rather poorly, or taking on commitments I can't fulfill. I have to be willing to prioritize, to thin out the activities that are less important, so that I can achieve my goals. I struggle with this constantly, and I keep hoping that I don't have to thin. Maybe all those carrots will do just fine on their own. Right? The garden keeps trying to teach me to cut back, to eliminate, to clear space for what matters. Maybe one day I'll actually learn that lesson.

Lessons from the Garden: It takes work

I've been doing an inordinate amount of gardening this summer, and I think I'm seeing connections between gardening and the rest of my life. Today's insights are all about the work involved in gardening:

• Be prepared for ongoing maintenance work. While there are some things in life that one can finish and be done with, most require ongoing maintenance: Touch up that paint job, work on your relationship, feed the dog. Every time I turn around, the garden needs to be weeded . . . or mulched, or aerated, or whatever. I don't think I knew when I started this how much ongoing labor is required to keep up a garden.
• Some tasks aren't fun. No matter how many (many!) times I weed, I never really enjoy it -- it's sweaty, grueling, unrewarding work. Again, this is true in so many areas of my life: no matter how much I enjoy something, there are always some parts of it that I just have to slog through.
• It always takes you longer than you think. I may go out with the idea that I will weed the entire front garden that day, but I'm lucky if I can get a quarter of that done in a day. This is a lesson I never seem to learn -- with every project I undertake, it invariably takes me *much* longer than I expect (this is known as the planning fallacy).
• Putting effort in early on can save you effort later. If I were to really weed thoroughly in the early spring, there would be fewer weeds later in the summer. But I never have enough time to do a thorough spring weeding, so I pay for it later with many more hours of weeding. This isn't true of all things in life, but it's worth remembering for some things.
• You don't have to do it all yourself. I do most of the gardening work myself, but I have a landscaper come in to do things that I don't have time, skill, or tools for -- I have them do tree planting and pruning, for example. And then, of course, Q has been a huge help -- not only does he help me weed sometimes, but he spent hours putting in our new, wonderful paths. Again, this is a lesson it's hard for me to learn -- I tend to think I have to do everything myself, but there is no shame in getting help from others.

Resisting completion

I have always found it much easier to start projects than to finish them. New projects are exciting and full of possibilities. I can dream about what I could do and how it will look when it is finished. I get excited about the vision of the final product. I pull out materials, look at designs, consider alternatives. This part is fun and can last a long time. Then at some point I get inspired to start -- I cut into the fabric, I sew together some of the pieces. At some point the project stalls. Maybe I can't figure out one step of the instructions. Maybe I can't decide what color to use for the binding. Maybe I just get too busy with other things. Then the project may languish for months or years before I get back to it. At that point, the enthusiasm has faded; the bloom is off the rose. While I still have the vision for the project, there is less impetus to keep moving on it. I'll often put the project away and start something else. While I do occasionally come back to an old project and work on it, sometimes even finishing it, I have all-too-many incomplete projects (I hesitate to even call them works-in-progress) to testify to this pattern.

In the last few months, I've been trying to revisit old projects and complete them -- to clear the boards for the new academic year. The unfinished projects have started to feel like an albatross around my neck (and no, it doesn't come with wafers). Plus, I am sick of feeling guilty about the incomplete projects, and I want to be able to have something to show for the work I have done.

I've made some headway -- I finished two house-painting projects, and I'm pleased with how they came out. But I've also figured out one reason I resist finishing projects. When something is finished, its possibilities are complete. It is all it will ever be, for good or ill. And sometimes (many times?), it is for ill. I finished two skirts, and while they are well constructed, they just don't look good on me. My vision was not realized, and the work seems wasted. Frankly, it's disheartening and depressing. I would rather have the incomplete project, with its dream of beauty, than the completed object, with its flawed reality.

I guess I understand why someone might be a dreamer -- having your head in the clouds means you don't have to see the dirt you're kicking up behind you.

I know that I have to be prepared that some projects won't work out the way I thought. I know that everyone has a certain "crap quota" -- we need to make a lot of bad stuff to get to the good stuff. I know that I should see these as learning experiences and think about what I could do differently next time. I know that it doesn't mean that I'm incompetent. I know that (in theory) I can make things that do fulfill my vision and make my heart sing. I know.

But in the meantime, maybe I'll just dream up a new project and live in its possibilities. What's so great about finishing things, anyway? Shouldn't we just enjoy the journey? ;)