In the Weeds

I spent a few hours pulling weeds out of our flower beds this afternoon. Actually, it might be more accurate to say I spent that time looking for flowers in our weed beds. I've completely neglected our yard this year.

There were several excellent reasons for that, but mother nature wasn't interested in any of them, so the weeds continued to choke the tulips and the little azalea bushes which I had planted last year, until I finally intervened. 

It was an imperfect effort, at best. Had you not seen the enormous mess it was before (or the four bags of yard waste I accumulated) you might reasonably have assumed the beds were still being ignored, as they could surely stand many more hours of attention. But it was yet another chance for me to practice imperfectionism and enoughness.

As I dug and pulled, I found myself thinking about how popular weeds are in folk wisdom, figures of speech, analogies, and such. (Click here for a few examples.) A pastor friend once told me he liked to pull weeds while thinking about what to say in his sermons, and I've known others who found weeding to be stress-reducing, or otherwise satisfying.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a big fan of weed-pulling (especially if you ask my fussy back), but I have been thinking lately about the idea that our outer worlds tend to reflect our inner worlds, so maybe, in addition to making our yard more presentable, clearing four big bags of weeds outside will in some small but significant way help reduce the mental cobwebs inside my mind/psyche, as well?

I have lots more clearing to do--inside and out--but this felt like a worthwhile start and even a hint of a return to normalcy after a long stretch of crisis management related to my parents' medical concerns. After all, what's more normal than weed-pulling? It's a tiny tortoise step, to be sure, but one I can gradually build on even as I continue to attend to the ongoing needs of my mother and father.