Digging Up Weeds
[Taken in Raleigh, NC last month]
I love all the ways my OCD tendencies come in handy – our home is very well organized, my accounting files are correct to the penny, and the latest gift this neurosis is providing is a much tidier backyard. I spent more than eight hours Saturday digging up…um…pretty much everything. After walking through our backyard every single day with blinders on to avoid looking too closely at the details of our landscaping, I finally decided to take a closer look and get to work. It isn't that our yard looked bad. A quick glance would show a wide variety of plants that had a certain unruly quality in their haphazard arrangement that I didn't necessarily mind. But my husband, well, he has a handful of topics that I like to call "Top Ten Subjects My Husband Loves to Gripe Incessantly About" and our landscaping was among the top three. After months of hearing him moan and groan and then moan and groan some more, I finally got in my car and went to the nursery and thus began a journey I have grown ferociously attached to. I also feel a bit like a stalker, going to the nursery every week and asking for the same knowledgeable, helpful salesperson for her advice on the latest area of the yard I want to tackle. Is she starting to think I'm creepy?
After working on a few smaller areas of our yard and getting adept at digging, fertilizing and planting, I went to the nursery, bought a shovel, came home and got going. I think I pulled up more than a dozen large plants, dead bushes, and a few shrubs I didn't even know were there because other plants had taken over, as well as weeds, rocks, bad soil and wilting flowers. By the end I was covered in dirt, exhausted and blissfully satisfied. I now look at the areas around the back of our house and feel ten pounds lighter. There is still much work to be done, and the few things I planted still look a bit sad, but it is exciting to see this space as a blank canvas, where we are free to create whatever we want and add to our outdoor living space.
It struck me this morning that all this clearing out in our backyard is an apt metaphor for what I've been doing in my life in very focused and specific ways over the past many months. We are always needing to take time now and then to re-evaluate, clear out and make room for new ways of being, projects and relationships, but ever since last fall my culling has had a more purposeful feel to it than usual. I have very consciously released a number of friendships, have even had an official break-up with someone. I have set boundaries in my life that might have been a little loose and fuzzy before but that now have a clear line of delineation that I no longer feel must be kept flexible in order to appease others. It sounds like I am becoming more rigid, but in fact it is giving my life more room for everything to flow more organically and freely. In digging up what isn't working, in tearing out ideas and patterns that grew so large they were choking off other parts of my life, I have created a much wider canvas on which to paint my life.
That is worth getting myself covered in dirt and bugs and sweat now and then. It is worth every minute of it.
