Trusting How You Do It

Now that I’ve planted all my seedlings I have to remember to water them regularly until they get established. While the ones in pots in sunny spots will need daily watering throughout the summer, the seedlings in the garden only need this until their roots reach deeply enough to sustain the variations they will naturally encounter over the summer. In past years, when I have had to go off on a teaching trip for three or four weeks, I have left detailed instructions for the brave souls who have volunteered (or been unable to say no to my request) to be Head Waterer.

While a garden this size requires more than one person to maintain, communicating is not always easy – especially when the Head Gardener (me) is more of an enthusiast than an expert. I hardly know what to do myself. I consider most of what I do in the garden to be an experiment.

This is true, but it’s also a story I tell myself.

Sometimes I only know how much I know when someone does something else – something that is clearly (to me) not the way to do things. Then Mr. Easygoing Head Gardener has to breathe deeply and explain more clearly what he knows (and expects) but had not yet communicated. I guess it’s a little like ordinary life. I’m more of an intuitive and tactile learner and I don’t often explain things as clearly as I might—even to myself.

I suppose that is why gardening and working with clay have always appealed to me.

When I first began teaching people to throw pots on the potter’s wheel, I was incredibly frustrated. I would explain the different steps required to center a ball of clay on the wheel and then watch as over and over as beginners would be wildly unsuccessful at bringing their lumpy ball of clay into a smooth and easy center. Demonstrating how to brace your hands and arms from your core as you lean in and push toward the center of the clay fared no better. The students were frustrated and I was frustrated.

I began to have success when I shifted strategy. First, I remembered that getting muddy and messy was part of the appeal of throwing pots. On this score, everyone was doing just fine right from the very beginning. Second, I learned to do all my explaining and demonstrating and then put my hands on top of the students’ hands to center the clay with their hands. This gave them the experience of the energy passing through their hands working with the spinning of the wheel to allow the clay to find its natural center. You have to learn to let the clay and the wheel do most of the work. Then the students learned to teach themselves. Of course it was slow and lumpy work, but that was part of the fun of it all.

It’s the same with the garden. If you want to be a gardener, reading books and talking to experts can be a good place to start, but your real learning has to come from the garden. The most important part of gardening is spending time in your garden looking and looking. The trick to growing things is learning to observe how things grow. They do it on their own. The most we can do is support the vast knowing already present in the seeds and plants themselves. (and in our lives?)

I do have gardening friends that are much more organized than me. Some take meticulous notes and have gardens that are much more carefully thought out than mine. This care is just right for them and is part of how they observe growing happening. For me, it’s more fun to work with the larger feeling of things—looking and sensing into some greater gestalt that is continually emerging.

I don’t think it matters how we garden, except that it’s helpful to find and trust the kind of gardener we are. Like individual plants, we each have our own natural ways of being and thinking and acting. When we appreciate and support the instinctive ways we interact with the world, we can be more at ease and more effective.

These days, however, I’m encountering one of the liabilities of my easygoing style. I am a little like a squirrel who has hidden his nuts for the winter and is now trying to remember where he put them. I have planted over a hundred seedlings at various spots around the Temple garden. Now every morning, I have to remember where they all are. It’s a little bit like the card game of concentration where you have to remember where the specific cards are so you can make a match with the face down cards.

But I don’t mind, I like wandering in the garden.

Personal Practice – What is your natural style? When you have a task to do – whether it is preparing breakfast or starting out on a big project, how do you approach it? What makes you feel comfortable as you work? What if your particular style was just right for you? What if you trusted your natural ways of doing things even more than you do? (The advanced practice today would be to also notice the difficulties inherent in your style and consider learning a new trick or two that would both honor how you do things and at the same time make things a little easier for you.)